News Release: World Wide Web Consortium Launches W3C European Semantic Tour

Today, in Rome, W3C launches its European Commission-sponsored "Semantic 
Tour," which brings presentations and demonstrations of Semantic Web 
technologies, given by W3C Members and Technical staff to five European 
locations.

Learn more about the Semantic Tour, and about the Semantic Web, by 
contacting Janet Daly, Head of Communications, at +1 617 253 5884, 
<janet@w3.org>, or the appropriate W3C representative for your region, 
as indicated in the press release.

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World Wide Web Consortium Launches W3C European Semantic Tour

European Commission sponsors Semantic Web infrastructure presentations 
from W3C Members and Team in Rome, London, Munich, Athens and Brussels

Web resources

This Press Release:
http://www.w3.org/2003/06/semantictour-pressrelease
(available in Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Japanese)

Schedule for Semantic Tour, including Agendas for individual events:
http://www.w3.org/2003/03/semantic-tour.html

W3C's Semantic Web Activity Homepage:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

W3C's Semantic Web Activity Statement:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity


http://www.w3.org/ -- 10 June 2003 -- The World Wide Web Consortium 
(W3C) launches its Semantic Tour today, bringing presentations and 
demonstrations of Semantic Web technologies to public audiences across 
Europe. The W3C Semantic Tour consists of a series of five one-day 
events beginning today in Rome, Italy, and ending on 24 June 2003 in 
Brussels, Belgium. Representatives of W3C Member organizations and the 
W3C Team explain how Semantic Web technologies help to create richer, 
more usable data on the existing Web. The use of these technical 
standards enables more effective discovery, automation, integration, and 
reuse of data across applications.

The Semantic Web Extends the Current Web

For the Web to reach its full potential, it must evolve into a Semantic 
Web, providing a universally accessible platform that allows data to be 
shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. The 
Semantic Web, first a vision expressed by Tim Berners-Lee at the Web's 
inception, is now best known as an initiative of the World Wide Web 
Consortium. Berners-Lee wrote an early Roadmap for the Semantic Web in 
1998, and it continues to be a good place to learn the architecture on 
which the W3C Semantic Web Activity is based.

The W3C Semantic Web Activity, launched in 2001, brings together experts 
and leaders in areas such as metadata, ontologies, and the Web, and 
encourages both the design of specifications and the open, collaborative 
development of technology.

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web that will allow you 
to find, share, and combine information more easily. It is designed to 
be a universal medium for the exchange of data, and allows vocabulary 
semantics to be defined and reused by any interested person or user 
community, making it cost-effective for people to record their 
knowledge, and share with others.

To facilitate these goals, a set of interoperable specifications are 
under development. W3C's Semantic Web work starts with a model called 
the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which consists of the basic 
Model and Syntax for descriptions and a way to assemble descriptive 
vocabularies, called RDF Schema. The next layer above, OWL - the Web 
Ontology Language, provides a way to decribe relationships between 
different vocabularies. These languages all build on the foundation of 
URIs, XML, and XML namespaces.

W3C Semantic Events Scheduled for Five Regions

The events themselves have been organized by ERCIM, the European Host of 
W3C, and five of the European W3C Offices (Benelux, Germany and Austria, 
Greece, Italy, and United Kingdom and Ireland).

The timetable and locations of the events are as follows:

     * 10 June: Rome, Italy, Pontificia Università Gregoriana 
(announcement also available on Office site in Italian)
     * 12 June: London, UK, Regent's Park (announcement also available 
on Office site in English)
     * 17 June: Munich, Germany, Astron Hotel Muenchen Deutscher 
(announcement also available on the Office site in German)
     * 19 June: Athens, Greece, Hotel Divani Caravel (announcement also 
available on the Office site in Greek and English)
     * 24 June: Brussels, Belgium, Diamant Building Congress Centre

Each event consists of a series of talks about W3C Semantic Web work, 
applications and test cases. These presentations are done by one to two 
W3C Team members and invited speakers representing the local community. 
All events are free and open to the public, but attendees must register. 
Please contact the local organizers for details.
European Commission funding encourages W3C outreach via its Regional Offices

Last year's W3C Interop Tour focused on the range of W3C technologies, 
and showing how they facilitate interoperability on the World Wide Web. 
This June's W3C Semantic Tour focuses on Semantic Web technologies, an 
area of increasing interest within the Web community. Both these tours 
exist thanks to funding from the European Commission in the form of the 
QUESTION-HOW project.

The tour benefits from another IST funded project - the W3C's Semantic 
Web Advanced Development work in Europe, also called the SWAD-Europe 
project. Practical demonstrations show the Semantic Web in action, 
addressing problems in areas such as: tracking documents and 
translations, sitemaps, news channel syndication, classification, and 
annotations.

Contact Americas, Australia --
Janet Daly, <janet@w3.org>, +1.617.253.5884 or +1.617.253.2613
Contact Europe --
Marie-Claire Forgue, <mcf@w3.org>, +33.492.38.75.94
Contact Asia --
Saeko Takeuchi <saeko@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170


About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing 
common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its 
interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly run 
by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT LCS) in the USA, the 
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) 
headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan. Services provided 
by the Consortium include: a repository of information about the World 
Wide Web for developers and users, and various prototype and sample 
applications to demonstrate use of new technology. To date, over 410 
organizations are Members of the Consortium. For more information see 
http://www.w3.org/

Received on Tuesday, 10 June 2003 03:00:29 UTC