W3C

Since 2003 CTIC has hosted the Spanish Office of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), whose main mission is to promote the adoption of W3C recommendations among developers, application creators and the Web community in general, promoting in turn the inclusion of organizations that are committed to the creation of future recommendations by joining the W3C.

Since the origin of this Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the W3C, CTIC has been an active part of the different groups that make it up , from those dedicated to defining basic development guidelines, to high-level groups where the requirements and implications of W3C work for society are analyzed. An example of this is the Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group, whose mission is to analyze problems of accessibility to content on the Web and seek solutions. This group works jointly with several Working Groups on accessibility, who provide lower-level technical forums to review and debate the high-level topics presented by the interest group.

Web Accessibility seeks to ensure that all people, regardless of their degree of functional diversity or disability, can can access the contents of the Web, promoting the creation of an egalitarian society.

CTIC researchers have developed the first standards to evaluate and validate the quality of semantic data represented on the Web. Currently, the Shape Expressions Community Group promotes and expands the validation language ShEx which uses a syntactic representation to describe the shape of an RDF graph. The ShEx language is used to communicate data structures associated with some process or interface, to generate or validate data, or to manage user interfaces.

CTIC promotes and works in the Interest Group on Web Commerce at the W3C. The mission of this newly created group is to improve electronic commerce on the Web for users, merchants, and other industry members by encouraging discussion within W3C and with other organizations on how to make improvements to address the needs of markets, public administrations and the community in general.

The aim is to identify all the requirements related to Web Commerce and the opportunities for standardization by the W3C.

CTIC experts in computer vision, virtual reality and augmented reality have promoted the Immersive Web Community Group, whose goal is to create specifications that bring high-performance Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to the Web platform, thus correcting the current situation, in which it focuses on specific systems that do not allow interaction between them. This will allow access to a greater number of developers, which would increase its use and applications, since the Web is present on any device today.

Virtual Reality allows us to interact with virtually created spaces, while Augmented Reality mixes real spaces with virtual ones, improving our interaction with the former.