>The papers from the 7th World Wide Web International Conference held last
week
>in Australia are now available at
>
>http://www7.conf.au/programme/fullprog.html
>
>They will be there until the end of May.
>
>Connection is slow, so haven't been able to explore yet - they seem mostly
>technical.
Hi Ian
I attended the WWW 7 conference, including the W3C tracks and the
Developer's Day (which aren't - yet - available from the URL you've given).
I'll be writing a report on the conference shortly. I'll post details to
this list.
Briefly the major development which should be of interest to members of
this list is RDF, the Resource Description Framework. Tim Berners-Lee
mentioned RDF several times in his keynote presentation (along with Dublin
Core). RDF will not only provide a generic framwork for metadata, it will
also provide "knowledge representation". This will enable more intelligent
systems to be developed on the web.
XML developements were also interesting, especially the XLink and
XPointers proposals. These will provide richer hyperlinking mechanisms on
the web - which will please the hypertext community who have argued for a
long time that the web's hyperlinking mechanism is very primitive. These
proposals, together with the Document Object Model, will enable arbitrary
portions of a resource to be processed (only give my the third to fifth
paragraph in the H1 containing the string "foo". In adition external link
databases will enable multiple routes through resources to be provided.
I did discuss the copyright and other legal implications of richer
hyperlinking with the chair of the working group. I got the feeling that
not much thought had been given to this (perhaps because it was felt to be
the remot of another group). I am currently raising some of these issues
with various W3C groups. I'd be interested in comments from members of this
list (about time for another exchange of views on copyright!).
I'd also be interested in views on the technical qualities of XLink and
XPointer from any hypertext experts on this list.
There were several technical papers which will interest lis-elibers e.g.
search engine issues, web characterisations (James Pitkow's paper raises
lots of interesting issues) automatic creation of metadata. I'll try and
summarise some of the intetresting papers later.
Brian
------------------------------------------------------
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus
UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, England, BA2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Homepage: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly.html
Phone: 01225 323943 FAX: 01225 826838
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|