Impact on Science and Industry
Michel Cosnard
W3C Tenth Anniversary
1 December 2004
Impact on Science and Industry
Denis Lacroix (Amadeus e-Travel)
Teri Richman (National Association of Convenience Stores)
Moderator: Michel Cosnard (INRIA and ERCIM)
The World Wide Web has strongly impacted Science...
- Scientists and researchers have drastically changed their way doing
research
- New avenues for research have been opened and are becoming increasingly
important
- Big progress ... new difficulties and challenges
...and Industry
- New services, new products, new markets, new companies
- New relationships between customers and vendors
- New production methods
- Impact on stock exchange
Big progress ... new difficulties and challenges
Web for scientists: changing the way research is done and published
- Giving access in real time to an enormous amount of data and
information
- Standards for data and information
- Creating research communities on increasingly specialized domains
- Facilitating cooperation between communities for multidisciplinary
research
- Publishing papers asap and under the authors' responsibility
- New ways of recording and evaluating research impact
...thanks to global standards and
universality
Research for the Web
- New formats have been discovered for data and information
publication
- New tools have been invented for text and data processing
- New tools for Web browsing and information searching
- Research on usage
Difficulties
Research communities have data stores and programs to
share
Key Web technologies are:
- Web Services: communications for applications
- Standards for interactions between programs on the Web
- Easier to Expose and Use services
- Semantic Web: meaning of data
- Standards for data, relationships, descriptions on the Web
- Easier to Understand, Search for, Share, Aggregate, Extend
information
Challenges
- From information and data to KNOWLEDGE
- From access to PROCESS
- From ad-hoc components to GENERIC components
- From manual interpretation and reasoning to (semi-) AUTOMATIC
Keys for Success
- Key factor: STANDARDS
- Key player: W3C
Leveraging the Internet to bring e-Commerce to the Travel Industry
Worldwide
![Denis Lacroix](denis.jpg)
Denis Lacroix
Director of Development
Amadeus e-Travel
Introducing Amadeus e-Travel
- Leading e-Commerce technology provider to airlines, online agencies and
corporations
- Over 60 airlines worldwide
- 300+ corporations worldwide
- Hundreds of online agencies
- …in 24 languages
Some Of Our 60+ Airline Customers
![Airlines](airlines.png)
What’s So Special about Amadeus e-Travel?
- Our customers use the Web as a key Sales channel
- We are the “Brand behind the Brand,” and use the Web to serve them
- E-Travel is an Application Service Provider “pure play” to the
travel industry, the only one of its kind
- All our customers worldwide are served with the same application,
using a community mega farm at our data center in Germany
Server Usage Snapshot
![Server Usage](server-usage.png)
Aggregated Air Volumes
![Air Volumes](air-volumes.png)
Lessons Learned
- The Internet can be a mission critical backbone for a global
operation
- The infrastructure is good enough that you can serve customers anywhere
in the world from a single location
- It’s harder to serve them with a single application, but you can
too…
- The World Wide Web standards are incredibly ubiquitous
The World Wide Web and the Convenience Store Industry
![Teri Richman](teri.jpg)
Teri Richman
Sr. VP Research and Public Affairs
National Association of Convenience Stores
About NACS
- Formed in 1961, located in the Washington, D.C. metro area
- 1900 retail company members, 1800 suppliers, over 60,000 stores
represented domestically
- Very involved in standards efforts of all kinds…product, payments,
POS/Back Office and device integration
Discussion Areas
- Customers
- Enhancing convenience, speed and access to new products and
services — satisfaction
- Employees
- Recruiting, training, intranets, labor scheduling,
communication
- Operations
- Item catalogs/images/pricebook maintenance
- B2B
- Open Site Architecture
Customers
![Pay at the Pump photo](pay-at-the-pump.jpg)
Pay at the pump ... the first self checkout
Making life easier…
![Financial Services photo](financial-services.png)
Financial Services,
Car Insurance ...
ATMs – Next Generation Functionality is exciting!!
Print digital photos... Download music & movies fast! ... Event
tickets... Directions... Weather... the list goes on and on...
Stay connected wherever you are, for whatever you need
Customer satisfaction tools
![customer satisfaction 2](customer-sastified2.png)
![customer satisfaction 1](customer-sastified1.png)
![customer satisfaction 3](customer-sastified3.png)
Finding What's New
New products and Services
![New Products 2 image](new-products2.png)
![New Item Specifics image](new-item-specifics.png)
New Item Specifics
![New Products 1 image](new-products1.png)
Employee Applications
![Employees Application image](employees-app.png)
- Recruiting
- Training (computer-based or online)
- Intranets / Communication
- Policies
- Necessary store level documents
- Labor scheduling
Operations Applications
![Data Sync image](data-sync.png)
- Item catalogs
- Product information
- Images
- Pricebook maintenance
- Data synchronisation catalogs
- e-Business-to-Business
![BtoB image](BtoB.png)
Open Site Architecture
Future of site control and maintenance
![site control and maintenance](site-control-maintenance.png)
Fuel price changes
![Fuel Price Changes image](fuel.png)
High water alarms
![High water photo](high-water.png)
How the W3C Has Helped our Industry
- Data Formats and Semantics
- HTML, XML, XML Schema 1.0 (including document vocabularies for
doing work)
- Common data format (XML) and common way of expressing the document
format or XML Schema via standards that work across all vendors
- Information Interchange
- Exchange of data using URLs
- Emphasis on Web services, has gone a long way toward standardizing
interoperation model for collaborating partners to implement
e-Business-to-Business
How W3C Can Help Us Going Forward
- Data Formats Semantics
- Two new features of XML schema: versioning and co-constraints
- Continued support for XForms as we believe that it will enable us
to define business processes that are out of reach today
- Information Interchange
- Web services going forward
Next Session
After the break, the Impact on
Society and Culture by Lee Rainie (Pew Internet & American Life
Project). Moderator: Daniel J. Weitzner (W3C)
All W3C10 Sessions