W3C Technical Plenary and Working Groups meetings

Cannes-Mandelieu, France, March 1-5, 2004

W3C hosts such an event once a year. It allows Working Groups to hold their face to face meetings, meet participants from other groups and collect information on outside groups activities during a Technical Plenary meeting . In march 2004, this event was hosted in Cannes-Mandelieu (France). Four days were devoted to the various working groups meetings, and one to the technical plenary meeting.

I attended the Semantic Web Interest Group face to face meeting as well as the Technical Plenary Day.

Semantic Web Interest Group

This face to face meeting was public, and was attended by many developers new to the community. The problems discussed were:

• Datatyping
• Performance of Semantic Web storage and retrieval
• An XHTML syntax for RDF
• Birth of Data Access Working Group
• Web Services
• RDF and Conceptual Graphs
• Implementation experiences
• Goals for 2004-2006

• Datatyping: semantics of Datatypes are unclear, and no efficient algorithm for computing Datatype entailment in RDF is known. The presentations were mainly about extensions of the basic model, which must still be studied.
• Performance: though promising tests have been presented with respect to number of triples stored in a database and retrieval of individual triples, there is still work to be done with respect to retrieval of a set of triples (the entailed RDF graph). The first problem is linear, while the second is NP-complete. Hopefully, this will be discussed in the upcoming Data Access Working Group.

Technical Plenary

After a Welcome session, the topics covered by the plenary meeting were:

• Architecture of the World Wide Web
• Mixed Markup languages documents
• Making Test Suites Work
• Web Access without PC
• Querying the Web

Discussions between members of different Working Groups cannot be as constructive as the ones in a Working Group face to face meeting. It is however of vital importance to have such a quick view on what is happening in other Working Groups: they can have solutions to problems closely related to our own.