Abstract:

 The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org, established and run 
 by Tim Berners-Lee, is a unique consortium where a large collection on 
 standards and procedures related to the web are being developed. Hosted by 
 the MIT, INRIA and Keio U, it include more than 500 organizations from large 
 companies to start-ups and universities . The core of the work is on
 XML, its derivatives and its expansion into a "semantic web".
    
 In the present talks we will give a survey of the W3C and of the 
 present active Working Groups. These include of course core XML, and the 
 immediate derivatives, like RDF, SOAP, SVG etc... (If you wonder what 
 are these acronyms go the W3C site or come to the talk.) Currently major 
 efforts concern Web services, privacy policies, voiceML, etc...

 and the beginning of a "semantic web"
    
 We will then analyse where / if and when a research institution can 
 benefit from being a member, what it implies, and the eventual 
 importance of an Israeli presence.