W3C Invites Implementations of 3 Candidate Recommendations

The Web Annotation Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation for three documents:

• Web Annotation Data Model: This specification describes a structured model and format, in JSON, to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms. Common use cases can be modeled in a manner that is simple and convenient, while at the same time enabling more complex requirements, including linking arbitrary content to a particular data point or to segments of timed multimedia resources.
• Web Annotation Vocabulary: specifies the set of RDF classes, predicates and named entities that are used by the Web Annotation Data Model. It also lists recommended terms from other ontologies that are used in the model, and provides the JSON-LD Context and profile definitions needed to use the Web Annotation JSON serialization in a Linked Data context.
• Web Annotation Protocol: This document describes the transport mechanisms for creating and managing annotations in a method that is consistent with the Web Architecture and REST best practices.

This is a re-publication, without substantial change, of the Candidate Recommendation published on the 5th of July for the Data Model and Vocabulary, and on the 12th of July for the Protocol. The only significant change (beyond some minor editorial clarifications and changes) is that the respective exit criteria for the Candidate Recommendation phase is now documented in the publications themselves.

Candidate Recommendation means that the Working Group considers the technical design to be complete, and is seeking implementation feedbacks on the documents. There is a separate document how to use them and report on implementation results. The group is keen to get comments and implementation experiences on these specifications, either as issues on the Group’s GitHub repository or by posting to public-annotation@w3.org.

The group expects to satisfy the implementation goals (i.e., at least two, independent implementation for each of the test cases) by September 30, 2016.

W3C Workshop Report: Blockchains and the Web

W3C published  the report of the W3C Blockchains and the Web workshop held on 29-30 June, 2016, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Participants at the workshop found many topics for possible standardization or incubation, including various aspects of identity and proof-of-existence, as well as smaller blockchain primitives that could increase interoperability across different distributed ledgers.

Discussion will continue in the Blockchain Community Group, which will coordinate across different communities and groups to foster standardization where needed, as discussed in the related blog post, “Building Blocks of Blockchains“. This popular workshop had over one hundred attendees, and was hosted by MIT Media Lab and sponsored by NTT, Blockstream, and other W3C Members.