Recently in Standards Category

To accelerate the development of HTML5 tools, Sencha, a provider of HTML5 frameworks and tools for desktop and mobile application developers, has completed a $15 million series B round of funding. Sencha raised $14 million funding in June, 2010. Additionally, the company also announced the public beta launch of Sencha.io, its new HTML5 mobile cloud service. The service will allow Sencha app developers to build “shared experiences” in the browser, without having to write server code or manage hosting. http://www.sencha.com/

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Media Annotations Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of "API for Media Resources 1.0." This specification defines an API to access metadata information related to media resources on the Web. The overall purpose is to provide developers with convenient access to metadata information stored in different metadata formats. The API provides means to access the set of metadata properties defined in the Ontology for Media Resources 1.0 specification. Comments are welcome through 07 August. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity. http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Annotations/, http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-mediaont-api-1.0-20110712/

Google announced support for authorship markup—a way to connect authors with their content on the web. They are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results. They now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you're already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, they will interpret that authorship information as well. http://www.google.com

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) membership has voted to adopt the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) XML Encoding Standard as an official OGC standard. This standard specifies an XML implementation for the OGC and ISO Observations and Measurements conceptual model (OGC Observations and Measurements v2.0, which is also published as ISO/DIS 19156), including a schema for Sampling Features. This encoding is an essential dependency for the OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) Interface Standard. More specifically, this standard defines XML schemas for observations and for features involved in sampling when making observations. These provide document models for the exchange of information describing observation acts and their results, both within and between different scientific and technical communities. This standard and other standards that have resulted from the OGC's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) effort enable developers to make all types of sensors, transducers and sensor data repositories discoverable, accessible and useable via the Web. The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. http://www.opengeospatial.org/

Kentico Software, the Web content management system vendor, introduced the Kentico CMS Windows Azure Partner Competency and awards Bit Wizards the first recognition. This competency provides Kentico CMS customers the opportunity to recognize partners based on expertise in delivering Kentico CMS driven websites into the Microsoft’s cloud. Kentico currently has 1,200 partners who actively use Kentico CMS for their web development projects. 154 of these partners reached the Gold Certified Partner level. 32% Gold partners come from North America, 45% from Europe and 23% from the rest of the world. www.kentico.com

The Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), the largest international non-profit association within the language and localization industry, is launching a full-time, funded initiative to define standards for the benefit of the entire industry. The association has commissioned Arle Lommel, one of the industry’s most respected and experienced standards experts, to manage the initial collaborative planning phase and to establish a framework for long-term execution of standards. In Phase I of the initiative, Lommel will lead a transparent effort to determine how the industry can collaborate to proceed with standards. He will seek input from localization buyers and suppliers, tool developers, and various partner localization and standards organizations. He also will explore funding options for a long-term, stable standards program that is available to all in the industry. Throughout this phase GALA will provide platforms for feedback and input to the process. The first will be a standards roundtable hosted by Serge Gladkoff, GALA Board member, to take 29 March, at the GALA 2011 conference in Lisbon. The roundtable will be broadcast as a webinar worldwide and interested parties who are not at the conference will be invited to listen and comment on the proceedings. The culmination of Phase I will be an industry standards plan that will lay out what standards should be pursued, how the standards will be developed in an open and unbiased way, and how the ongoing standards initiative can be funded by the industry. http://www.gala-global.org

XBRL International, Inc. (XII) announced an expanded membership structure that allows corporations, associations, NGOs, regulatory bodies, government agencies, not-for-profits and others the option to directly join the XBRL International consortium, the global standards organization that develops the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) standard and advocates its adoption. In January 2011, XII launched its Abstract Modelling Task Force to build a common blueprint for software architects, engineers and developers to use as they create XBRL-enabled solutions to meet the growing uses of XBRL. No Magic, Inc., a software modeling provider, is a Partner supporting that effort. From time to time, XII creates additional technical working groups to support development and adoption of the standard. In addition to direct members at the international level, XII also maintains a global network of local market jurisdiction members in more than 30 countries. Each jurisdiction is generally comprised of member organizations that include regulators, government agencies, for profit corporations, not-for-profits, associations and academics. www.xbrl.org

W3C Extends HTML Working Charter: HTML5 Last Call in May 2011 and Recommendation in 2014.
The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) extended the charter of the HTML Working Group, reaffirming the commitment for HTML5 to reach Last Call in May 2011, and announcing plans to reach Recommendation by 2014. W3C is developing a comprehensive test suite to help achieve broad interoperability for the full specification. "Stable specifications are useful targets for interoperability at the same time that innovation never ceases". http://www.w3.org/News/2011#entry-9015, http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/

Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management company, has proposed to contribute its Content Repository technology (Nuxeo Core) to the Eclipse Foundation. The “Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository” project, if approved, will build on the initial contribution to deliver a modular and full-featured Content Repository technology, leveraging CMIS as main access protocol and API. The emergence of standardized content repository services is a logical evolution of the maturing content management technology market. Nuxeo is proposing this contribution to Eclipse in order to accelerate adoption of this content management technology, expand the developer community and to create an open source reference implementation for a content repository compliant with CMIS (the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services) standard. The Enterprise Content Repository project will provide developers with a reference implementation for content repositories. The scope for ECR includes APIs (Java, REST), content management interoperability support via CMIS, and a wide range of content repository services. Nuxeo encourages additional participation from both the Eclipse and Nuxeo communities via the Eclipse Proposals Forum. http://www.nuxeo.com http://www.eclipse.org

The W3C's Web Performance Working Group is working on a specification to define 20 "fine-grained" metrics to measure the duration of just about every aspect of a web user's navigation behavior. The W3C's working draft of the Navigation Timing Specification is in the "last call for comments" phase. After being finalized, it will specify 20 measurements for every page visited. http://test.w3.org/webperf/specs/NavigationTiming/