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The Multimodal Interaction Working Group. has published a Candidate Recommendation of Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0. As the web is becoming ubiquitous, interactive, and multimodal, technology needs to deal increasingly with human factors, including emotions. The specification of Emotion Markup Language 1.0 aims to strike a balance between practical applicability and scientific well-foundedness. The language is conceived as a "plug-in" language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior.

The group also published Vocabularies for EmotionML, a Working Group Note.

Learn more about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.

W3C is pleased to announce that registration is open for a new edition of the W3C online course "Mobile Web 2: Programming Web Applications". Developed by the W3C/MobiWebApp team and taught by Marcos Caceres, this course gives developers all the tools and knowledge necessary to write mobile Web applications that can ship both online and in application stores, using today's advanced technologies. The 6-week course begins 11 June. An early bird rate of 195 Euros is available until 25 May; after that date the full price is 225 Euros so register now.

The Geolocation Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Geolocation API Specification. This specification defines an API that provides scripted access to geographical location information associated with the hosting device. Comments are welcome through 10 June. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

Today W3C launched the new Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group to promote the use of linked data on the Web. Per its charter, the group will explain how to use a core set of services and technologies to build powerful applications capable of integrating public data, secured enterprise data, and personal data. The platform will be based on proven Web technologies including HTTP for transport, and RDF and other Semantic Web standards for data integration and reuse. The group will produce supporting materials, such as a description of uses cases, a list of requirements, and a test suite and/or validation tools to help ensure interoperability and correct implementation. Learn more about the Semantic Web.

W3C announced today that eight months after the launch of Community Groups to speed Web innovation, more than 1200 people are participating in 80 groups with wide-ranging interests, including mobile profiles, Web games, and big data. "We wanted to encourage richer and more diverse conversations about Web technology at W3C, and we are off to a great start," said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. "A number of design choices (such as the permissive copyright license) have made this an appealing work environment to important stakeholders. The program is young but promising, and will continue to improve as we learn from our community."

The W3C Membership, which convenes next week at its semi-annual meeting, plays a preeminent role both in Community Groups and in turning innovations into interoperable, Royalty-Free Web standards through an open consensus process. Open Web Platform traction has resulted in more than 80 organizations becoming W3C Members in the past year. Read the full press release and testimonials from some new W3C Members and learn more about W3C Community and Business Groups.

The Device APIs Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendations of Battery Status API and Vibration API. The first defines an API that provides information about the battery status of the hosting device. The second defines an API that provides access to the vibration mechanism of the hosting device. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to indicate that the document is believed to be stable and to encourage implementation by the developer community. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Web Performance Working Group has published two Last Call Working Drafts: Performance Timeline and User Timing. The first defines an unified interface to store and retrieve performance metric data. The second defines an interface to help web developers measure the performance of their applications by giving them access to high precision timestamps. Comments are welcome through 07 June. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Proposed Recommendations for RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa Lite 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1.

Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language. The group also published a draft of the RDFa 1.1 Primer today.

Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published Working Drafts of CSS Exclusions and Shapes Module Level 3 and CSS Regions Module Level 3. Exclusions and Shapes lets people define arbitrary areas around which inline content content can flow. CSS Exclusions extend the notion of content wrapping previously limited to floats. The CSS regions module allows content to flow across multiple areas called regions. The regions are not necessarily contiguous in the document order. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Provenance Working Group published 5 Working Drafts today related to the PROV data model. Provenance information can be used for many purposes, such as understanding how data was collected so it can be meaningfully used, determining ownership and rights over an object, making judgments about information to determine whether to trust it, verifying that the process and steps used to obtain a result complies with given requirements, and reproducing how something was generated. The PROV model is used to represent provenance records, which contain descriptions of the entities and activities involved in producing and delivering or otherwise influencing a given object.

• PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model introduces the provenance concepts found in PROV and defines PROV-DM types and relations.
• Constraints of the Provenance Data Model introduces a further set of concepts useful for understanding the PROV data model and defines inferences that are allowed on provenance statements and validity constraints that PROV instances should follow. These inferences and constraints are useful for readers who develop applications that generate provenance or reason over provenance. (First Public Working Draft)
• PROV-N: The Provenance Notation allows serializations of PROV instances to be created in a compact manner. (First Public Working Draft)
• PROV-O: The PROV Ontology expresses the PROV Data Model using the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2).
• PROV Model Primer provides an intuitive introduction and guide to the PROV specification for provenance on the Web.

Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The W3C Advisory Committee has filled six open seats on the W3C Advisory Board. Created in 1998, the Advisory Board provides guidance to the Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. Beginning 1 July 2012, the nine Advisory Board participants are Ann Bassetti (Boeing), Jim Bell (HP), Michael Champion (Microsoft), Steve Holbrook (IBM), Qiuling Pan (Huawei), Jean-Charles Verdié (MStar Semiconductor), Ora Lassila (Nokia), Charles McCathieNevile (Opera), and Takeshi Natsuno (Keio University). Steve Zilles continues as interim Advisory Board Chair. Read more about the Advisory Board.

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of two Candidate Recommendations:

• Web Workers, which defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism.
• HTML5 Web Messaging, which defines two mechanisms for communicating between browsing contexts in HTML documents.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The SPARQL Working Group published three Last Call Working Drafts today:

• SPARQL 1.1 Overview, which provides an introduction to a set of W3C specifications that facilitate querying and manipulating RDF graph content on the Web or in an RDF store.
• SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol, whichd escribes the use of HTTP operations for the purpose of managing a collection of RDF graphs in the REST architectural style.
• SPARQL 1.1 Query Results CSV and TSV Formats, which describes the use of CSV(comma separated values) and TSV (tab separated values) for expressing SPARQL query results from SELECT queries.

Comments are welcome through 01 June.

The group is further planning to shortly release a 2nd Last Call working draft of the SPARQL 1.1 Query Language, after which we plan to advance all Recommendation track drafts in the next iteration to Proposed Recommendation directly. To this end, the group is currently gathering implementation reports and would appreciate reports from the community of implementations of any of the SPARQL1.1 specifications. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3. CSS Writing Modes Level 3 defines CSS features to support for various international writing modes, such as left-to-right (e.g. Latin or Indic), right-to-left (e.g. Hebrew or Arabic), bidirectional (e.g. mixed Latin and Arabic) and vertical (e.g. Asian scripts). Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Internationalization Core Working Group has published a Working Draft of Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Normalization. This Architectural Specification provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference on the use of normalization of text and string identity matching on the Web. The goal of this specification is to improve interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

W3C announces today a Workshop on Web-Based Signage, 14-15 June in Tokyo (Chiba), Japan, and hosted by NTT. W3C is organizing a workshop to share perspectives, business use cases, and technology requirements so that the Open Web Platform can be used on large digital displays (such as those found in city squares and at sporting events). We invite operators of consumer electronics companies, digital signage platforms, advertisers, browser vendors, sign owners, and others to participate in this discussion. W3C membership is not required to participate in this workshop. Please submit a statement of interest by 16 May and learn more about participation.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Media Queries. HTML and CSS support media-dependent style sheets tailored for different media types. For example, a document may use sans-serif fonts when displayed on a screen and serif fonts when printed. Media queries extend the functionality of media types by allowing more precise labeling of style sheets. Please see the Working Group's implementation report and the Media Queries Test Suite. Comments on the Proposed Recommendation are welcome through 23 May. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Server-Sent Events. This specification defines an API for opening an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server in the form of DOM events. The API is designed such that it can be extended to work with other push notification schemes such as Push SMS. Comments are welcome through 17 May. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Get started in developing Web sites that work well on mobile devices by registering to W3C's "Mobile Web 1: Best Practices" online training course! The now 6-week long course starts Monday, 30 April. Read the course description and register before April 25 and save 30 Euros!

Developers and designers are excited by the ability to use the graphical features of all modern browsers - Canvas, SVG, CSS, WebGL, and HTML5 video and audio. W3C is proud to support The Graphical Web 2012, which is both the first in a new international conference series on Open Web Graphics and the 10th conference on Scalable Vector Graphics, 11-14 September 2012. This year, the conference returns to Switzerland and the site of the first SVG Open. ETH Zürich will be hosting the conference at its Hönggerberg campus. Members of the W3C SVG Working Group, including W3C Team members Chris Lilley and Doug Schepers, will be attending the conference. The SVG Working Group will also brief attendees on recent developments around the SVG specification, including SVG2 and integration with CSS3 and HTML5. The conference includes a day of instructional courses. The deadline for presentation abstracts and course outlines is 7 May. Learn more about the W3C Graphics Activity.