Henry S. Thompson
14 Feb 2006
- there are so many to choose from!
- Seriously, why standards?
- Interoperability
- Monopoly sounds attractive
- and periodically companies get sucked in to trying
- But customers are (rightly) wary
- ISO
- The International Standards Organisation
- The grand-daddy of them all
- One country, one vote
- 'Real' standards, e.g. SGML, Coloured Books
- IEEE
- Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
- Membership open to individuals (and now via companies), modest cost
- Standards committees open to any member
- Hardware 'standards', e.g. Ethernet, WiFi
- IETF
- Internet Engineering Task Force
- Crypto-anarchist commune
- Hold-over from the early days
- Output known as RFCs (Request for Comment)
- Mostly protocols, e.g. TCP/IP, BIND, http
- OASIS
- Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
- Vendor organisation, rebadged SGML-Open
- Corporate membership
- Sometimes seen as a bid by big guys (Microsoft and IBM in
particular) to undermine W3C
- Vertical 'standards', e.g. ebXML, WS-Reliability, WS-Security
- The World Wide Web Consortium
- A membership organisation
- "Leading the Web to its full potential"
- Originally responsible for broad horizontal technologies:
- HTML
- XML (and friends)
- SVG
- RDF
- SMIL
- And social and public responsibility:
- Accessibility
- Internationalization
- Latterly focussing in a bit as well:
- MathML
- VoiceXML
- Web Services
- Mobile Web
- Multi-modal interaction
- Membership is for companies and non-profits
- Membership costs real money
- Many discussions in public, more-or-less
- But only paying members participate in decision making
- Work is done in Working Groups
- Open to all Members
- Avoids exposure to anti-trust/Restraint of Trade problems
- Chartered with particular deliverables
- W3C staff provide basic support
- Mixture of face-to-face and phone conference work
- W3C Process ensures
- Consensus-based decisions
- Regular review
- Interoperable implementations
- Transparent IPR situation
- A huge problem for standards bodies
- A way of getting an effective monopoly:
- Join a standards body
- Produce a standard which depends on a key bit of technology
- Have a patent for that technology!
- The main alternatives
- RAND
- Reasonably and Non-Discriminatory
- RF
- Royalty Free
- W3C has pioneered a requirement for a commitment to RF
- Took four years to negotiate agreement
- Still lost some members
- Commitment is, essentially, to give RF licence for any technology
which is required to implement a Recommendation.
- Doesn't require a patent search, but many companies (believe/act as
if) it does
- OASIS began with no IPR policy, now requires a RAND/RF choice.
- Early implementations of SOAP required licenses from four
distinct companies, one of whom was very slow to respond to requests.
- IETF has struggled with the issue, not really resolved yet
- It is generally accepted (but not officially agreed) that IETF
dropped work on Sender ID because of Microsoft's RAND requirements for participation
- In summary, a real minefield
- RDF and OWL are 'finished'
- Standardization work is underway in
-
Gather requirements and define an HTTP and/or SOAP-based
protocol for selecting instances of subgraphs from an RDF
graph
-
The goal of this work is to help make it as easy to 'join'
data on the Web as it is to merge tables in a local
relational database.
-
Publications:
- Provide guidance, in the form of documents and demonstrators,
for developers of Semantic Web applications.
-
Develop consensus best practices on ontology engineering
guidelines, vocabulary development, educational material and
demo applications.
-
Support initiatives for transforming selected high-visibility
ontologies and thesaurii to OWL and RDF.
- University of Edinburgh belongs to W3C
- You could volunteer for a W3C working group
- Already represented on
- XML Schema
- XML Core
- XML Processing Model
- XML Query
- MathML
- Standardisation work is a contribution to the public good
- Like writing open source software
- But with more politics