Can you find Steven Pemberton in this image?
The W3C group dependency Webpage, and other components of their Website, are generated to SVG from RDF. Other examples of "eating your own dogfood" came up during the talk, including generating color-coded time charts of different formats and their various phases. We at INS2 should see how this tool works and perhaps adopt components of it. He also mentioned the switch of the W3C Europe office from INRIA to ERCIM starting January 2003.
Our old friend Philipp Hoschka headed up a session on the Interaction Domain. It included potential new work, including 3D and SMIL. A working group on SMIL as a whole is becoming more and more of a viable possibility. Philipp mentioned during coffee that the interest comes from Timed Text, Sony's submission of video editing extensions for SMIL and from a not yet public interest from Microsoft via OMA and the DVD forum to replace XHTML+SMIL with time sheets. Also interesting was his discussion on compononent extension to control how different formats display together and coordinate style. This session was followed up with a QA session. Basically, this covered W3C suggestion grass-roots like activities for providing QA in a way that didn't tax or threaten members.
Tim Berners-Lee announced in a very long sentence that the W3C Patent Policy is now complete and approved. It is "royalty free", stating all working group (of that specification) members must agree to license essential claims they hold on a royalty free basis. Exceptions can only be made early in the working group process.
On Tuesday morning I gave a half-day SMIL tutorial. Eight people registered, a respectable but small number, reflecting the general interest in SMIL. They were smart and attentive enough to ask good questions, but none worked directly or deep enough in application areas to provide new insights. The exception was Janina Sajka, who works for accessibility for the blind.
The conference opened with a long, impressive animated (with SMIL!) SVG showing all the logos from past WWW conferences. The animation was made by SVG extradorinaire Bob Hopgood, and the music by an apparent relative Paul Hopgood. Two Hungarian dignitaries gave the usual speeches about the local economy's significance in the Web world. Then Princess, three babes with violins, played popped-up classic medleys accompanied by a drumbox. Stunned by this high-tech hyperactive performance, the audience was prepared for Tim Berners-Lee's opening keynote.
Multimodality is interesting to INS2 because of its view of multimedia in terms of categories of sensory interface. Bert Bos of CSS fame provided a lot of insights of how CSS applies to modality. The panel spoke repeatedly about the potential of the Semantic Web to increase adaptivity in the multimodal sense. Janina Sajka was also on the panel. She and I spoke before the panel about tools and techniques for generating synthesized speech.
This panel was led by none other than our very own Prof. Dr. Lynda Hardman. Jim Hendler's answer to one question started a discussion on the Semantic Web being at the start of the curve up in adoption. Several argued that the tools are there and small pockets of adoption are there. What should happen next is the small pockets becoming large enough that people cannot afford to not take part. People went on from this to discuss how the methodologies, understanding and details of use evolve as the needs and implementations co-evolve.
