September 2003.
Daniel Dardailler, Project Manager.
QUESTION-HOW stands for "Quality Engineering Solutions via Tools, Information and Outreach for the New Highly-enriched Offerings from W3C".
It was a two-year Accompanying Measure, from Sept 2001 to Sept 2003, for 1950KEuros (half of that going to W3C offices in the form of subcontracts), with two different facets:
QH is now over and it was a successful project. The main outcomes are a series of state of art demonstrators of stable and emerging W3C technologies, the creation or extension of W3C offices and added awareness of W3C in Europe.
The World Wide Web and its infrastructure, the Internet, plays the key role in the development of the Information Society. The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to "lead the web to its full potential" by evolving the Web as a "robust, scaleable, adaptive infrastructure". W3C's main deliverables are its Recommendations (specifications) that evolve the Web protocols plus timely conversion tools, validation systems and checklists.
The arrival of vertical XML applications, the ability to enhance information with metadata, the ability to negotiate content with the device and a richer interaction model at the client leaves the industry with complex decisions as to how to evolve their company by providing quality solutions. As the web recommendations are used in handling core business processes, the need for correct integrated future-proof solutions are a major challenge.
The W3C has expressed and received support from the European Commission IST Program (FP5) to improve the quality of its Recommendations as the number and complexity increases and the need to interwork becomes more important. This was addressed by the QUESTION-HOW project by the developments of:
The project has also contributed to an extended outreach of W3C. The current set of Offices cover about 75% of the European Union population. To make a more complete coverage of the existing European Union in terms of first line support, there will be the need to open new Offices and/or widen the area covered by existing Offices. This has been done by:
Finally, the outreach of W3C has been improved through:
As of end of August 2003, the project is now finished. Major achievements include:
Following are some more details about the work done, workpackage by workpackage.
WP01 and WP02 were a series of technical sub-projects, defined and executed by W3C staff or office technical staff (as subcontractors).
WP01 gave the emphasis on stable technologies (CSS, XML, I18N, XSLT) and the work was mostly done house by W3C staff.
Several demonstrators were developed, among which:
WP02 gave the emphasis on more recent technologies (XHTML QA, Metadata, Multimedia, Mobile) and was done mostly by office technical staff.
It included:
These demonstrators are available across a range of Web locations and are not held together in one project site, although they are all linked to from the following project page. This has the advantage of embedding the demonstrators in Web navigation routes that users requiring them will use, thereby increasing their impact.
WP03 and WP04 were concerned with extending the W3C Offices program.
WP03 was concerned with a series of regionalization of existing offices:
The current office host (RAL) has already good contacts with the academic circles in Ireland (e.g, at the Trinity College), which is a good basis for start. Discussions with the representatives of Irish W3C members showed a great interest for such an extension of the UK office.
The contacts between the German and Austrian technological and industrial communities are traditionally good, and various professional societies, like for example the German GI (Gesellschaft fur Informatik) have regularly meetings with their Austrian colleagues. In view of the linguistic facilities, creation of a joined German and Austrian office was the best solution.
That there was a need for a presence in Belgium was clear from the statistics, and the closeness of the Dutch office leads to the obvious choice for regionalization in the area.
WP04 with the creation of 3 new offices:
Although a relatively small county in term of population, Finland is clearly an important player in the Internet area. Linguistically "isolated", it is not feasible to include Finland into a regional office of some kind, e.g, a Scandinavian office. Hence the establishment a separate office there.
As shown by the statistics, this is one of the strong countries in the area, with a stable W3C member that has already expressed its interest in establishing an office. Similarly to Finland, the linguistic isolation of the country makes it difficult to include Hungary in any larger regional office.
This country was clearly underrepresented in the W3C community. The first discussions with local contacts had revealed that linguistic issues played an important role in this, insofar as the local community is not fluent enough in English to closely participate in the usage and the dissemination of W3C technologies. A Spanish office will play a very important role for W3C and the Web, with an effect in the whole Latin-American community, too.
With these plans now implemented, a close to 100% "coverage" of today's European Union, as well as some of the new members possibly joining the union in 2004, has been achieved.
WP05 and WP06 was focused on Outreach: 2 conference tours and a support materials were developed for outreach to be used in our tours.
WP05 consisted in a series of one day events across Europe.
In the first year of the project, in 2002, the purpose was twofold:
The schedule of the events has been the following:
A public Web page has been published in April 2002 presenting the tour at: http://www.w3.org/2002/03/interoptour.html
A press release has been issued on 21 May and is available at: http://www.w3.org/2002/03/interoptour-pressrelease (translations in French, German and Dutch)
In 2003, the W3C has organized a second series of one day events across Europe, which purpose was to promote the W3C Semantic Web technologies. Representatives of W3C Member organizations and the W3C Team explained how Semantic Web technologies help to create richer, more usable data on the existing Web.
The schedule of the events was the following:
All events were open to the public and free of charge.
A public Web page was published in March 2003 presenting the tour.
The tour was advertised on the W3C home page in the first days of April, and stayed as a top news for 2 weeks. Again, it made the top news during the period covering all the events. Moreover, in each country, Offices were able to announce their own local event many on-line publications' agendas.
A press release was issued on 10 June 2003, and translated into 5 languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Japanese).
European press reported on the tour, specifically in each visited country (see below), but it is worth noted that this tour was also advertised in other publications, such as this Japanese one:
Both tours have been extremely well received, the attendance in all stops was very good and quite enthusiastic. The panels were very successful and fully attended, even if scheduled at the end of each day.
Most of the attendees were already acknowledgeable of W3C work, at all levels of understanding. A good number of industrials were present, and judging by the quality of numerous questions, all the attendants were satisfied with the level of interaction provided. At the London event, a participant expressed its great satisfaction by rating the event as the best self-funded development day he ever attended.
Finally, the theme of the Semantic tour was more attractive, as it is regarded as a new short term challenge in the IT sector. Last year's Interop Tour was less successful in respect. The press attendance was remarkably high in average, thus leading to a very good presence of W3C's work in either the public press or the technical one.
WP06 was concerned with establishing what dissemination aids needed for the tools developed in WP1 and WP2, establishing what was needed to promote the new W3C Recommendations using experience from W3C-LA and allocate the PR material to one or more of the categories (presentations, handouts, stand decoration, demonstrations).
The deliverables fell in 4 different categories:
Within the Question How project, for the purposes of both the two tours of presentation events and for other presentation a further large number of presentations have been produced which have added to this archive of material. This activity acted as a spur to both W3C staff and member organisations to address the presentation of internationalisation which has improved considerably during the timescale of the Question How project. A second issue addressed by both these presentation slides and the posters produced as materials for booths at exhibitions within this workpackage has been to present the W3C membership in a graphic display showing the international spread. This has resulted in both presentation slides, and poster materials in SVG based on plotting membership on a world map.
The existing handouts W3C usually distributes serve a purpose for a technically centered audience, but they do not present the work of W3C to a general audience who wish to know what W3C can do for their industry, business or market sector. To fill this gap, within the Question How project, W3C has analysed the standard industrial market sectors and the technologies that it recommends for web usage, concluding which technologies are most significant to each sector, as shown in the deliverable page.
Several stand decorations were designed to promote W3C web technology at events and exhibitions organised by W3C or the national and regional offices of W3C. Within this project we have chosen to design re-usable poster templates that can present different aspects of W3C, and which can persist beyond the duration of the project itself.
This deliverable was concerned with gathering all the technical demonstrators done in WP01 and WP02 and making sure that they were all usable by people external to the project.
The overall goal expressed in the Technical Annex was:
"QUESTION-HOW is aimed at providing the environment necessary for European companies to make mission critical decisions of quality with regard to the emerging Web specifications from W3C."
And it was associated to three sub-goals:
At the end of the project, W3C and its offices have developed a complete set of tools that can, and are already, used by European industry to make quality decisions with regard to their positioning in the new economy.
As an active dissemination programme, the QH project has made aware the industry and the academic world in Europe of those tools and of the work of W3C in general.
The creation of stable and effective additional W3C offices in Europe will show its effect over time, as the project was mostly concerned by planting the seeds of such a relay service. Our Spanish office for instance, is already generating of lots of new interest in the country for W3C activities such as Semantic Web and QA.
One of the lesson learned concerns the reality of seeding the W3C message only in places that provide a ground able to sustain with the industry needs. We realized during our attempts to find a new office in Central Europe, in addition to the new office we opened in Hungary, that it did not make sense to force the establishment of an Office just to satisfy the QH project requirements. The risk of failing in the long terms due to lack of a strong will to pass the W3C message was too high.
We think we have achieved all these goals, through the series of state of art demonstrators developed, the creation and extension of W3C offices and the two European conference tours, and we look forward to more cooperation with the EC and the industry in Europe in leading the Web to its full potential.
The Web industry needs a solid base for growing beyond its current base. We think the QH project has contributed a lot in terms of making this base open and universal through its W3C involvment.