Introduction to A2WF Community Group

Dear AI KR Community Group members,

My name is Wolfgang Wimmer, and I recently joined the AI KR Community Group
and was
reading through the activities of this Group and content.

I would like to briefly introduce the Agent-to-Web Framework (A2WF)
Community Group, which was recently launched at W3C.

The group has already attracted strong early interest, including
participation from Paola Di Maio, Chair of the AI KR Community Group, as
well as participants from Google LLC and other experts working on AI, web
standards, privacy, and governance.

The A2WF Community Group can be found here:

https://www.w3.org/community/a2wf/

A2WF focuses on a specific and emerging problem: autonomous AI agents are
beginning to interact with websites in ways that go beyond reading content.
They may fill forms, book appointments, add items to carts, submit
requests, or initiate transactions.

Today, website operators do not yet have a common machine-readable way to
express what AI agents may do on their websites, where authentication is
required, when human verification is needed, and how such actions should be
governed.

This is the gap A2WF is intended to address.

From my perspective, A2WF and AI KR are highly complementary.

AI KR focuses on knowledge representation, conceptual modelling,
vocabularies, semantics, provenance, interoperability, and explainability
in AI.

A2WF focuses on the website governance layer for AI agent actions, for
example, what an agent may access, submit, book, purchase, or trigger on a
website, and under which conditions.

I believe there is a valuable opportunity for collaboration between AI KR
and A2WF, especially around terminology, semantic models, policy
representation, provenance, accountability, and compliance.

There is also increasing regulatory pressure. The EU AI Act is becoming
applicable in phases, with significant obligations applying from August
2026. Topics such as transparency, governance, accountability, human
oversight, and compliance are becoming increasingly important. A2WF may
contribute to this discussion by helping website operators express
agent-related governance rules in a structured and machine-readable way.

We have also shared information about A2WF with NIST by email, as we
believe that AI agent governance on the web is relevant not only in Europe,
but internationally.

I would like to invite interested AI KR members to join the A2WF Community
Group:

https://www.w3.org/community/a2wf/join

We are also planning our first A2WF web meeting:

Wednesday, 27 May 2026
17:00 CEST / 11:00 EDT / 08:00 PDT / 15:00 UTC

The goal of the first call will be to introduce participants, discuss the
initial scope of A2WF, collect relevant use cases, and explore how A2WF can
relate to existing W3C and AI-related work, including AI KR.

I would be very happy to welcome AI KR members who are interested in this
topic, and I would greatly appreciate your feedback, input, and
participation.

Best regards,
Wolfgang Wimmer
Chair, A2WF Community Group