Monday, April 4, 2011

20th International WWW Conference

WWW Conference series provides the world with a premier forum about the development of the web. I had the privilege of being a part of this conference which brings together researchers, developers, users and vendor – all who are passionate about the web and what it has to offer, now and in the future. This time it was India which hosted the series in Hyderabad, a beautiful city know for its culture, technology growth and food. The 5 days conference was bifurcated into following tracks:

Keynotes: Dr.Abdul Kalam believes that the biggest hindrance in making the web truly democratic is the language barrier. Web has changed from 'What can I take' to 'What can I give'. web 3.0. Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of web wants every big company to convert all of it’s' data sets into semantic web formats and open it up with annotations. Advocating web apps for mobile rather than native apps.

Panels: “Connecting the next billion web users” panel summarized lets use TV_DVD and mobiles to get WWW into these rural areas and Web services must have voice embedding and internationalization for web accessibility.

Tutorials: “Web Retrieval” 270 millions web sites, 20 billion indexed pages, 1 billion users this tutorial had high queries to generate accurate, fast responses to search queries. “Linked Data” showed how it enables uniform access, parsing and interpretation of data and how novel wealth of structure data cab potentially be exploited for creating new applications. “Web of things” happened to be my favorite tutorial as it was addressing the concept of how web could be well accessed from embedded devices like TV, Mobiles, iPods, tablets and automotive entertainments systems.

Research Papers: World class Web researches presented their papers on Intent understanding, ranking, monetization, web security, social network algorithms, search systems. IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google research labs had their own stand at the exhibition hall and showcased effective demos based on their research finding. Speaking to each of them I am totally convinced that the web is getting better day by day. Check out my Presentation:
W3C track: W3C organized two “camps” over 2 days: on accessible multilingual Web and on mobile web applications. I was invited to talk on industrial prospective as to why “It’s the perfect time for Mobile Web”. My talk covered; 10 reasons why it’s the perfect time for mobile web, current challenges in the Mobile Web and finally demoed HTML5 apps working well on all the mobile platforms and mobile browsers in online and offline mode. Later half there were some interesting discussion on the native vs mobile web, HTML5 road map & performance.

Key thing from the conference was that Mobile Web is the future and all have the right for accessing web. Let’s all work towards making web accessible to all through embedded devices taking away the barriers of language, religion, cast and creed.
View Pictures at https://picasaweb.google.com/bhavsidd/WWW

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