Projects
W3C POWDER
I am chair of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) working group at W3C. The purpose is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata… which translates into English as a means to identify resources and services that meet specific criteria such as accessibility, suitability for display on mobile devices (mobileOK), medical accuracy, eCommerce standards etc.
Quatro Plus
This EU-funded project is an implementation of POWDER as applied to trustmarks. It is designed to make trustmarks machine readable and processable so that search engines, portals and other services are better able to personalise the online experience.
Quatro Plus is beginning to mature (at last!) with a variety of applications built on top of a bunch of Web Services offered openly from a multi-server (i.e. scalable) infrastructure. See the latest newsletter (December 09).
Positive Content Focus Group
Not a project as such but worth a mention. I'm one of about a dozen people from around Europe helping the European Commission work out a possible future strategy to identify and promote content that is positively good for children. This is a refreshing change from the more usual debate about how to block content.
Social Web Incubator Group
Although this is a W3C activity, as an incubator group, it doesn't create standards. It's a discussion forum for people interested in social media, in particular, how to share social data in a privacy and context-sensitive manner. The three co-chairs are Vodafone's Dan Appelquist, Harry Halpin of Edinburgh University and Eduserv and Dan Brickley of, well, he's Dan Brickley. From an i-sieve point of view, we want as much data as possible to be available - but it can be anonymous and still be very useful.
East Suffiolk Line Walks
Nothing to do with work as such but I do look after a local tourism Web site associated with the railway on behalf of various community groups.
Youth Protection Roundtable
This is something I took part in while working in my previous job but was invited to continue to participate under the i-sieve banner. It's a Thematic Network of people involved with online child safety and, interestingly, digital inlcusion. In April 2009 the project ended with the publication of a Tool Kit (4.5MB, PDF). It's a catalogue of non-binding references for the improvement of youth protection online designed to support various stakeholders involved in the processes of service and content provision, hardware and software development, parents' counselling, children's education, multipliers' training, and political decision making.