News Release: A Sprinkle of POWDER Fosters Trust on the Web

A Sprinkle of POWDER Fosters Trust on the Web

New W3C Standard to Raise Confidence in Site Quality, Relevance and 
Authenticity

http://www.w3.org/ — 1 September 2009 — Today W3C takes steps toward 
building a Web of trust, and making it possible to discover relevant, 
quality content more efficiently. When content providers use POWDER, the 
Protocol for Web Description Resources, they help people with tasks such 
as seeking sound medical advice, looking for trustworthy retailers, or 
searching for content available under a particular license (for 
instance, a Creative Commons license).

"People ask me how to pick out useful content among the vast amounts of 
information on the Web," said POWDER Working Group Chair Phil Archer of 
the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications (IIT), NCSR 
Demokritos. "POWDER contributes to the solution. POWDER statements 
combined with authentication technology can help people find information 
that meets their own standards for quality, automatically."

Kai Scheppe of Deutsche Telekom AG added, "From a content provider's 
perspective this new means of describing Web resources opens up new 
possibilities for our customers to discover content with a higher degree 
of relevance. We are currently in the process of bringing POWDER 
documents online and look forward to broad spectrum adoption of this 
technology by information providers, aggregators and users alike."

POWDER Descriptions Help Automate Content Discovery

When content providers use POWDER descriptions, people can use tools to 
help discover relevant content. For instance, a site wishing to promote 
the mobile-friendliness of its content or applications can tell the 
world using POWDER. Content providers start by creating content that is 
conformant with W3C's mobileOK scheme and validating it with the 
mobileOK Checker. The checker generates POWDER statements that apply to 
individual pages. But a key feature of POWDER is that it lets content 
providers make statements about groups of resources — typically all the 
pages, images and videos on a Web site. Other tools such as the i-sieve 
POWDER generator (not from W3C) generates POWDER statements about the 
mobile-friendliness of entire sites. Once these POWDER statements are in 
place they can be used by search engines or other tools to help people 
find mobile-friendly content.

POWDER statements alone do not guarantee quality or relevance, but 
POWDER statements do promote accountability: they are always attributed 
to a "publisher." Knowing that people seek to build trust via the Web, 
publishers can take the next step by ensuring that their POWDER 
statements can be authenticated automatically. One consequence is that 
people will no longer have to "click to verify" trustmarks. Instead, 
tools can automate the verification, making life simpler for users while 
reducing the likelihood of spoofing.

"We continue to study the application of POWDER," said Phil Archer. 
"With support from the EU we are examining POWDER and general trustmarks 
(in the Quatro Plus project) and identifying quality health-related Web 
resources (the MedIEQ project)."

The POWDER Working Group published three W3C Recommendations today: 
Grouping of Resources, Formal Semantics, and Description Resources. For 
more information about POWDER, including a POWDER Primer and a range of 
tools, see the group home page.


EDITOR's NOTES:
===============

Web Resources:
--------------
This press release:
   - in English: http://www.w3.org/2009/09/powder-pr.html.en
   - in French: http://www.w3.org/2009/09/powder-pr.html.fr
   - in other translations:
     http://www.w3.org/Press/Overview.html#x2009-powder

W3C POWDER main page:
     http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/

Press Contacts:
--------------
Contact Americas, Australia —
     Ian Jacobs, <ij@w3.org>, +1.718.260.9447 or +1.617.253.2613
Contact Europe, Africa and the Middle East —
     Marie-Claire Forgue, <mcf@w3.org>, +33 6 76 86 33 41

About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]:
-----------------------------------------
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where 
Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to 
develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the 
creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term 
growth for the Web. Over 400 organizations are Members of the 
Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and 
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European 
Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) 
headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan, and has additional 
Offices worldwide. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

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Received on Tuesday, 1 September 2009 16:08:54 UTC