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The World Wide Web Consortium is touring Europe, spreading the doctrine of interoperability on the Web, in the hope of attracting new members and new ideas.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a non-profit organisation that works with developers and software makers to come up with standards for the Internet that are generally available for public use, such as XML and HTML, as well as new standards like voice XML. The group is currently holding a series of events, including one in Dublin on Thursday, to promote W3C technology recommendations.
But the EU-funded tour also has a second purpose, the W3C claims, which is to announce the expansion of some of the non-profit's national offices into regional offices. As such, the organisation is expanding its UK office to cover Ireland, its French office to cover Belgium, and its German office to cover Austria.
"We have fewer members in Europe than we do in the US," Michael Wilson, the W3C's UK manager, told ElectricNews.Net. "Our European members include the big computer companies that you would expect. But our membership in America includes lots of smaller but more innovative companies and we just don't have that profile in Europe."
These small companies, said Wilson, are responsible for developing and implementing some of the W3C's newest interoperability standards and the organisation wants to get access to these resources in Europe. He also said that the organisation was looking to involve more traditional firms, such as oil companies and healthcare firms, who also have a vested interest in the Web's standards.
"We want to get those people involved in the process... the more of them we have involved, the more likely our standards are to be adopted," he said.
The W3C, which was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, now has around 500 member organisations from around the globe. The group has six Irish members -- Baltimore Technologies, Iona Technologies, Mobileaware, Propylon, Vordel and Voxpilot -- a cross-section that includes some of the "smaller and more innovative" European companies that Wilson claims the W3C is try to attract.
The W3C is hosted by three organisations in three countries: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in France and Keio University in Japan.
The W3C's event in Dublin will take place at the Central Hotel on Exchequer Street on 30 May and will feature a number of speakers, including Daniel Dardailler, W3C deputy director for Europe, and Oisin Hurley, principal engineer at Iona Technologies. Wilson will also speak at the event.
The group's final event is set to take place in Brussels on 3 June, but another European tour that deals with Web services and what is known as the semantic Web is due to begin later this year.
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