W3C Southern Africa Office
W3C Southern Africa Office
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. The Southern Africa W3C Office (W3C-SA) is the national contact point for W3C activities in Southern Africa, as defined by the UN and comprising of Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland. It is located in Pretoria.
2009-09-14: Since its first meeting in December 2007, the W3C has launched three working group initiatives around Video on the Web:
2009-09-14: Has produced an Ontology for Media Resource 1.0 and a Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for Media Object 1.0 as Public Documents. The ontology document looks at providing a unifying way of aggregating meta-data from various existing annotation schemes, some media of which are specific. The Mapping_Table, still a Draft Document, provides a useful view of all the annotation schemes and how they map together within the Ontology for Media Resource. Use Cases provide such examples of what Media Annotations will be used for. For example, a photo might have many interesting information embedded in or associated to it by the camera that took it, by the photo album software, by the user comments : how can all this information be accessed in a simple, unified way? The API (Application Programming Interface) then specifies how to access these aggregated media annotations for common use. This will make this information available in the Web document, hence exposing textual content and structure of the Media Resource. The Media Resource becomes part of the Web Document and does not remain an alien, external object as it is currently the case today.
Has released two working drafts : The Use cases and requirements for Media Fragments draft gives convincing examples for why slicing audio, video or images is needed to make video a first class citizen of the Web. The Media Fragments URI 1.0, draft specifies what a user would typically type as an URI in the browser location to reference or access a specific part of a video, audio or image. There will be a release of technology survey of the state of the art in terms of video, audio and image formats regarding the ability to reference, access or slice the media resources along such dimensions as tracks, time, space without decoding. The Working Group is also investigating media framework to implement the technology.
Has released the Timed Text (TT) Authoring Format 1.0 – Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP) to specify how to create media online captioning. It includes test cases and implementations that make practical use of the technology. Through these various efforts, including better inclusion within HTML, non textual contents such as video and audio, already present on the Web, will become an integral part of the Web fabric.
Many important W3C drafts have been released as candidate recommendations and are waiting your comments and feedback. Any user can now read these documents that will make future guidelines and send feedback to the relevant W3C Working Groups for revision. This is a great opportunity to be give your insights on how the Web is intending to progress.
If you are familiar with RSS feeds, I use w3c-synd/home.rss to keep in touch with the main information - Site Summaries in W3C's own words. Here are few calls:
HTML 5 Drafts Published 2009-08-26: The HTML Working Group has published Working Drafts of HTML 5 and HTML 5 differences from HTML 4. In HTML 5, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes. Learn more about HTML.
SSML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation 2009-08-27: The Voice Browser Working Group has updated the Candidate Recommendation of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1. SSML is designed to provide a rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation of synthetic speech in Web and other applications. Although the Working Group has not formally identified any features as being at-risk, as a result of the previous publication, the Working Group now understands that some features may not receive adequate implementation experience. This draft identifies them in the status section and asks for feedback. A few editorial errors in the previous draft and the Implementation Report Plan document were also fixed. A list of changes from the previous draft is available. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity.
Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Draft Published Tuesday August 25 02:002009-08-25: The Voice Browser Working Group has published a Working Draft of Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0. This document specifies VoiceXML 3.0, a modular XML language for creating interactive media dialogs that feature synthesized speech, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, telephony, mixed initiative conversations, and recording and presentation of a variety of media formats including digitized audio, and digitized video. A list of changes from the previous draft is available. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity.
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0: Updated Working Draft Thursday July 23 02:002009-07-23: The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0. UAAG defines how browsers, media players, and other "user agents" should support accessibility for people with disabilities and work with assistive technologies. Read the invitation to review the UAAG 2.0 Working Draft and about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). For further information contact Guillame Olivrin at golivrin@meraka.org.za
A researcher at the Meraka Institute of the CSIR, Philip Frost, will participate in two European Union Framework Programme 7 (EU FP7) projects over the next few years. The Flemish Institute for Technology (VITO) is the lead partner, along with numerous European and African partners.
The first, titled DevCoCast, focuses on GEONETCast applications for and by developing countries. The DevCoCast project plans to disseminate and support the use of environmental data to and from developing countries.The CSIR contribution will be to produce daily near real-time moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) active data in the form of ASCII files. (ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment and other devices that work with text.) These will be transferred to the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) for dissemination via the GEONETCast system. The main purpose of the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) is to deliver weather and climate-related satellite data, images and products - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With each of the MODIS satellite overpasses (four times per day) over southern Africa, the MODIS DB system at the CSIR Satellite Applications Centre will create a fire product that will enable regional users to download and integrate the product into their own geographic information systems (GIS) systems without having to run their own MODIS DB system. Frost explains, "The project will prove that the GEONETCast concept works efficiently all over the globe and will pave the road for a widespread usage of GEONETCast in the future." GEONETCast is a near real-time, global network of satellite-based data dissemination systems designed to distribute space-based, air-borne and in situ data, metadata and products to diverse communities. In the past, GEONETCast has been used to disseminate data produced by European entities to developing countries (North-South one-way). Frost points out, "A new important step is proposed in the project - the environmental data come from the developing country and are disseminated to the developing country. This will allow active inclusivity for developing countries in the GEO effort. "They will not only receive information but also add value to this information as well as fostering the exploitation of this added value, through a wide dissemination of their products." Frost notes the important benefit of South-South exchanges (as the experience acquired in some developing country will be visible by other countries) with big potential for cross fertilisation.
The second FP7 project, AÏDA, deals with advancing ICT for disaster and risk management (DRM) in Africa. The AÏDA project is aimed at acquiring and sharing knowledge about affordable ICT solutions in Africa to reduce the risk of natural disasters and to improve the capacity to respond to disasters. "Many developing countries in Africa are exposed to serious environmental disaster risks," Frost points out. "Disasters can often not be prevented, but the loss caused by these events could be minimised by the use of ICT solutions." The CSIR will develop a customised version of the Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) for the Nelspruit Fire Fighting Association (FFA), located in Mpumalanga. The incident command centre at the Nelspruit air field is responsible for coordinating all vegetation fire fighting in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Gauteng. Due to the high number of fires within these provinces during winter (in excess of 50 fires at any given time), preference needs to be given to fires with a higher probability of becoming a disastrous fire. The current system is based on phone calls from the public received by the command centre. With each report, a spotter plane is deployed to the scene to investigate the seriousness of the fire. Water-bomber planes and fire fighting helicopters are then deployed to start fire suppression. The internet connection to the Nelspruit FFA is very slow and unreliable, due to its remote location outside Nelspruit. The AÏDA project will enable the distribution of fire-related products through GEONETCAST to a dedicated fire information system for the Nelspruit FFA. Frost applauds the broad objectives of the AÏDA project to assess natural hazards, the vulnerability of the communities and disaster risks in Africa, and assess the role of ICT-based systems in each hazard category. Furthermore, it will explore the ICT trends and needs for the future and test the usefulness of GEONETCast as an alert system. Additional deliverables are to share this information with all DRM stakeholders in Africa (by workshops and other mechanisms) and prepare three showcases of operational African DRM systems for demo at these workshops. Emphasis is given to the promotion and support of the technology take-up for use in other disasters; participants are also expected to liaise with any new project in DRM with a significant involvement of African partners.
A second group of Meraka Institute researchers - Dr Anwar Vahed, Graeme McFerren and Terence van Zyl - will be participating in the Integrated Risk Management for Africa (IRMA) FP7 project. The University of Luxembourg leads the project; consortium members include the CSIR, Thales Alenia Space and Cisco. IRMA aims to demonstrate a rapidly deployable ICT-based solution for public warnings and emergency management. The goal is to mitigate the impact of natural disasters and possible consequential humanitarian crisis. Vahed explains, "The project will address the availability and reliability of defined services and existing and new networks to ensure public safety communication. It will leverage redundant communication channels, wherever possible, and use automatic redirection or transformation of communications in case of network failures." 'Bridging' networks using the Internet Protocol (IP), with particular emphasis on leveraging IP version 6 (Ipv6), will become an enabler for providing the new functionalities. The general architecture of IRMA is 'system-of-systems' based. Outputs of this project are scenarios involving at least two hazards in African countries such as Morocco, Cameroon, Senegal and Mozambique. Vahed notes, "In sub-Saharan countries, fires - specifically wildfires - act adversely on natural resources. An early warning email system will notify stakeholders of a fire in or near a specified protected area in Senegal and neighbouring countries." The CSIR's experience in wildfire alerting will be brought to bear on these applications. Mozambique, the second use case, is prone to a range of natural disasters, such as cyclones, drought, floods, epidemics, pest infestations and landslides. The devastating floods of 2000 resulted in the loss of about 800 lives and the damage was estimated at over US $450 m.
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