| email: | dsr@w3.org |
| tel: | M: +44 796 838 5661 or T: +44 1225 867351 |
| URL: | http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett |
| address: | 35 Frome Road, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 2EA, United Kingdom |
I am a UK citizen living in the west of England close to the city of Bath. I am married with a son and a daughter, and used to frequent travel. I enjoy working in distributed teams and have worked in this way since the early nineties. I am a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and attached to the European host (ERCIM). My current roles are as follows:
I have a strong interest in AI and opportunities for overcoming the limitations of deep learning to enable continuous learning with much smaller datasets. This involves a synthesis of AI, Linked Data, Cognitive Science and Sociology, as the basis for a next generation of conversational agents that combine common sense and emotional intelligence. I acted as a guest panelist for the UK All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on AI.
My previous work on the Web has covered a wide variety of areas: driving early work on standards for HTML and HTTP (the foundation stones for Web), mathematics on the Web (MathML), voice and multimodal interaction, as well as work on financial services (XBRL), automotive and Web payments.
I have also participated in a variety of EU FP7 and H2020 projects including PrimeLife (privacy and identity management), Webinos (personal zones for devices and services), Compose (highly scalable IoT service platform), Serenoa (model-based UI), and most recently Create-IoT and Boost 4.0.
I was a W3C Fellow from 1995 through 2009, and have had a deep involvement with the development of key web standards since 1992, e.g. HTML, HTTP, XHTML, MathML, XForms, and VoiceXML.
From September 2007 through September 2009, I was employed by JustSystems and worked on declarative approaches to Web application authoring. This included work on a library for rendering SVG in Flash written in the Haxe programming language. I also got involved in work on XBRL, developing an open source tool to convert XBRL filings and taxonomies to RDF, and for rendering them to XHTML. JustSystems went on to sponsor my role as a member of the XSB, and my travel costs for the October 2009 workshop on financial data on the Web which I organized and co-chaired with the support of W3C, XBRL International and the FDIC.
From February 2006 through July 2007, I was employed by Volantis as a Principal Researcher working on standards and proof of concept implementations in support of the company's mission to provide multi-channel deployment solutions for Web-based services. This work focused on techniques for authoring and adapting web pages to provide an effective user experience on mobile devices.
From February 2003 through February 2006, I was employed as a consultant by Canon. My time was divided up between work as W3C Activity Lead on Voice Browsers (up until January 2005), Multimodal Interaction, and consultancy for Canon on W3C related technologies.
Prior to joining Canon, I was employed by Openwave Systems where I worked on developing ideas for future products and coordinating their involvement in the World Wide Web consortium (W3C). Before joining Openwave in late 2000, I worked at HP Labs as a researcher in information systems and helping to drive early standards work on HTML, HTTP and other Web technologies.
In addition, I have provided companies with assistance on several patent suits relating to early work on the World Wide Web. This has included appearing as a factual witness in a US Federal court.
In 1994, I organized a birds of a feather (BOF) on HTTP, and went on to launch and chair the IETF HTTP working group, as well as driving early standards work on HTML+, HTML 3.0, HTML tables and working with NCSA on the design of HTML forms.
At ECMA, I introduced and helped to drive work on ECMAScript 4th edition, and introduced and drove work on a compact profile (ECMA 327) primarily aimed at mobile environments.
I have helped to influence the direction of the WAP Forum (now the OMA) and successfully influenced the convergence of WML 1.1, and WAP 2 with W3C standards via presentations on HTML, XHTML, CSS, VoiceXML, Multimodal and ECMAScript.
As a member of the W3C staff and W3C Fellow, I have driven work on HTML, MathML, XForms, VoiceXML, Multimodal Interaction and the Ubiquitous Web. This have involved in organizing workshops, drafting charters, leading technical work, acting as editor and generally helping to drive consensus. I am currently W3C's Activity Lead and Chair for Ubiquitous Web Applications, and before that I have been Activity Lead for work on Multimodal Interaction, Voice Browsers, HTML and Forms (not all at the same time).
I have helped to drive W3C's work on context awareness for web applications, initially in the Multimodal Interaction working group and later in the Device Independence working group (now replaced by the Ubiquitous Web Applications working group). The Delivery Context Interface provides a means for web applications to dynamically adapt to the device capabilities, user preferences and environmental conditions (e.g. geographical location, battery level and RF signal strength) and has been developed together with France Telecom, IBM and Nokia.
During 2005, I was also involved in helping to launch work at the IETF on a protocol used to support XML-based user interfaces, where the user interface and application logic may be on different machines, and coupled via an exchange of XML DOM events and update/mutation operations. In addition, I have been preparing the ground for W3C work on the Ubiquitous Web which is about giving Web developers new power to create distributed applications that break free of the traditional client/server model.
In 2006, I organized a chaired a W3C Workshop on the Ubiquitous Web at Keio University in Japan, and subsequently developed and promoted the charter for a new standards group at W3C, which was launched as the Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group in April 2007. The group aims to enable an ecosystem of developers, device vendors, network operators, and websites through the application of Web technologies such as markup, event-base scripting and the Semantic Web. For more details, see my talk on Ubiquitous Web Applications at XTech 2007, where I chaired the conference track devoted to the Ubiquitous Web. I recently organized and chaired the W3C workshop on authoring (see the associated W3C news item) The workshop focused on how the use of declarative techniques that capture the application developer's intentions, rather than the exact means for how to realize them, could reduce the costs and improve quality for developing and maintaining Web applications.
Developing and driving a vision of technology and services to bring people together and fulfil the potential of the Web.
I enjoy working in teams, whether locally or remotely, and helping to build consensus, as well as influencing the timing and direction of work as part of corporate objectives.
I have managed a number of Summer jobs for students with projects ranging from math on the Web, embedded browsers, voice browsers, and unified messaging.
I enjoy giving talks, e.g. on Voice, Multimodal, XHTML, XForms and the Ubiquitous Web, at commercial and academic conferences
I have very much enjoyed travelling to many parts of the world during my work for JustSystems, Volantis, Canon, Openwave, HP and W3C.
I have developed several open source projects including Arena (an early web browser used by W3C to prototype CSS), but am best known for "HTML Tidy" a very popular tool for tidying up HTML.
I developed a web-based alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint called HTML Slidy and am now working on web-based editing, see below.
Most recently I have developed a Web of Things application platform using NodeJS along with lightweight libraries for Linked Data and tools for visualising and validating Linked Data Graphs.
I have worked on solutions for adding speech capabilities to Web browsers with the support of Loquendo. For more details, see my Google TechTalk from 1st February 2006. That talk also describes my ideas for richer mechanisms to support distributed meetings, and for recording and playback of presentations along with the speaker's voice building upon HTML Slidy.
In 2006, I developed a proposed extension to HTML together with an implementation as a cross browser library (XForms Transitional) that provides spreadsheet-like capabilities without the need for scripting. For example, simple declarative expressions for calculated fields, a richer set of intrinsic data types including numbers, dates and times, simple ways to specify validation constraints, the ability to determine when a field must be filled out based upon the values of other fields, and similarly when a field or group of fields are irrelevant and can be hidden from view, and a simple means to support repeating sets of fields.
I have worked on a web-based processor and renderer for XBRL, written in C for high performance. Before that, I worked on applying the Adobe Flash Player to a cross-platform renderer for SVG, and an associated SVG editor that runs within the Web browser, and its application to XML Slidy for web-based presentations. I presented this at SVG Open 2008.
I am exploring techniques for combining statistical natural language processing, the Semantic Web and computational models from cognitive science. My starting point has been the development of software for part of speech tagging and statistical natural language parsing. I am hoping to combine this with ideas from ACT-R and CHREST for cognitively plausible models of inference and learning.
During 2005, I worked on developing a way to add speech and VoIP capabilities to modern Web browsers via a local HTTP-based speech proxy, and exploiting XmlHttpRequest (AJAX). This uses the Loquendo libraries for speech synthesis and recognition for the speech server, but end users only need to install a small portable proxy server. The decision to implement a proxy server came after experience with implementing a binary Firefox extension for speech synthesis which I demoed at the W3C Technical Plenary in early 2005. It turned out to be very challenging to add support for speech recognition, and would in any case only work with Firefox, while the proxy server would work with any modern web browser.
I have been involved in a number of book projects
I am well known for my tutorials on HTML, CSS and VoiceXML: