W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Decisions and Decision-Making Incubator Group, whose mission is to determine the requirements, use cases, and a representation of decisions and decision-making in a collaborative and networked environment suitable for leading to a potential standard for decision exchange, shared situational awareness, and measurement of the speed, effectiveness, and human factors of decision-making.. The following W3C Members have sponsored the charter for this group: DISA, MITRE, and CNR. Read more about the Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is not on the W3C standards track but in many cases serves as a starting point for a future Working Group.

The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0. UAAG defines how browsers, media players, and other "user agents" should support accessibility for people with disabilities and work with assistive technologies. This draft adds requirements in seven new areas, including support for speech input, video playback controls and a new section on conformance. It introduces a new supporting document, Implementing UAAG 2.0 as a First Public Working Draft. Read the invitation to review the UAAG 2.0 Working Draft and about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

W3C announced today a Workshop on Conversational Applications - Use Cases and Requirements for New Models of Human Language to Support Mobile Conversational Systems, 18-19 June 2010 in Somerset, New Jersey (USA), Hosted by Openstream. There is currently an increasing need for new capabilities of the human language model to support sophisticated conversational applications. The goal of the Workshop is to understand the limitations of the current W3C language model in order to develop a more comprehensive one. Participants will collect and analyze use cases and prioritize requirements that ultimately will improve support for language capabilities that are unsupported today. Position papers are due 2 April. Please see the Call for Participation for more information.

The WebCGM Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of WebCGM 2.1. Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) is an ISO standard, defined by ISO/IEC 8632:1999, for the interchange of 2D vector and mixed vector/raster graphics. WebCGM is a profile of CGM, which adds Web linking and is optimized for Web applications in technical illustration, electronic documentation, geophysical data visualization, and similar fields. WebCGM aims to balance graphical expressive power on the one hand, and simplicity and implementability on the other. A small but powerful set of standardized metadata elements supports the functionalities of hyperlinking and document navigation, picture structuring and layering, and enabling search and query of WebCGM picture content. WebCGM 2.1 refines and completes the features found in WebCGM 2.0. Learn more about the Graphics Activity.

The XML Processing Model Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language. This specification describes the syntax and semantics of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language, a language for describing operations to be performed on XML documents. Pipelines are made up of simple steps which perform atomic operations on XML documents and constructs similar to conditionals, iteration, and exception handlers which control which steps are executed. The group has produced an implementation report Comments are welcome through 15 April. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

The Web Security Context Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Web Security Context: User Interface Guidelines. This specification deals with the trust decisions that users must make online, and with ways to support them in making safe and informed decisions where possible. This document specifies user interactions with a goal toward making security usable, based on known best practice in this area. Comments are welcome through 31 March. Learn more about the Security Activity.

The Media Annotations Working Group has published Working Drafts of Ontology for Media Resource 1.0 and API for Media Resource 1.0. The former document defines the Ontology for Media Resource 1.0, a core vocabulary to describe media resources on the Web. It is defined based on a core set of properties which covers basic metadata to describe media resources. Further it defines syntactic and semantic level mappings between elements from existing formats. The ontology is supposed to foster the interoperability among various kinds of metadata formats currently used to describe media resources on the Web. The latter defines a client-side API to access metadata information related to media resources on the Web. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.