Trip Report WWW2003 May 20-24 2003, Budapest, Hungary

1. pre-conference activities
2. conference at a glance
3. opening ceremony
4. benchmarking of locally and geographically distributed Web-server systems (tutorial)
5. poster presentation
6. conference evening
7. patent policy
8. Web services
   1. Web Services (WS)
   2. Web Service Description Language (WSDL)
   3. implementations / examples
9. accessibility
10. documentation
11. other trip reports
12. previous conferences

1. pre-conference activities:

zürich - budapest by train | budapest in 1 day (may 18/19, 2003)

i rode the night train from zürich via münchen to budapest which left zürich at 1733 on sunday and arrived in budapest at 0913 the next morning with two hours stopover in münchen. but the journey was quiet and i arrived in budapest relaxed and ready to do some sight-seeing.

sleeping coach with 2 beds

view from the citadella towards north with duna and parliament

view from the citadella towards south buildings of the technical university reside near the bridge

i joined philipp rütsche and his family on a tour through the city of budapest. we visited the "burgviertel", the center of pest, the old market hall and i also climbed the citadella from where i had a gorgeous view over budapest and the river duna. find more pictures of budapest here ...

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2. conference at a glance:

novotel budapest	entrance to the budapest congress center	reto - philipp - roberto - ernst

some basic facts:

1. the novotel / budapest congress center is a suitable host for this conference. the rooms are large enough, but some of the hallways are rather narrow, especially during lunch. the WLAN works most of the time with good performance. they try to provide more power plugs for the notebooks, or as they said during the opening ceremony: "this is the plugest conference ever" ...
   
   
2. there are even less participants than in hawaii - the list of pre-registered attendees shows about 850 names (17 from switzerland). at the opening ceremony, they claim that there are about 800 attendees from 57 countries (in hawaii, they claimed about 900 attendees).
   
   
3. this is the first conference without the presence of robert cailliau ...

the 13th WWW conference (WWW2004):

• will be held in new york, USA, may 17..22, 2004
• see the official website for details once it is there ...

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3. opening ceremony:

the 12th World Wide Web conference (WWW2003) was officialy opened by mr. kálmán kovács, minister of informatics and communications.

after his short talk, the "princesses with violins" - the very attractive, talented and gifted ildiko molnár, krisztina pados and kriszti sándor - played the violins to everyone's delight.

 

tim berners lee during his speech	the second highlight of the opening ceremony after the princess' performance was tim berners lee's speech. he was introduced as "our shaman". again, he spoke about the semantic web, as he did during the last 3 or 4 years. however, what's different is the fact, that i think, this time i really got the point ! he said: "Web services and semantic web are building out rapidly from the URI-HTTP-XML base. While they are being developed independently, they will merge naturally and strengthen each other as development continues. Web Services meet immediate need. Semantic Web has exponential growth potential."
i stole the drawing above from tim's presentation. i think it shows the beauty of his sematic web idea in perfection. things in the real life are connected in various ways. for example, the address is connected to a map, an event and a flight through the fact that all these "things" have a location. other things are connected through a time line etc. the goal of the semantic web is to connect the data without the need for conversion, transformation or duplication.

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4. benchmarking of locally and geographically distributed Web-server systems:

this tutorial identifies main performance issues associated with distributed Web-server systems, and covers methodologies, tools, and techniques that can be used for evaluating their performance and scalability. the focus is on performance analysis of locally and geographically distributed architectures based on the use of workload generators and analyzers. the tutorial identifies the characteristics, issues, and tradeoffs of existing popular benchmarking tools (which are free or at nominal costs), and presents case studies related to LAN and WAN systems based on the presenters' experience on working systems and prototypes.

• overview
• slides part 1 (as PDF)
• slides part 2 (as PDF)

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5. poster presentation:

more than 200 posters were presented at this conference, see the online documentation for details.	erik wilde of the ETH zürich presents 3 posters: Making XML Schema Easier to Read and Write Character Repertoire Validation for XML Documents Conference Time-Table Management

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6. conference evening:

the conference evening took place on the river boat europa, sponsored by the hungarian tourist office.

see photo gallery for more pictures ...

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7. patent policy:

the patent policy was a major issue for the last few months at the W3C. it is actually a real breakthrough that they finally managed to agree on a patent policy.

the goal of this policy is to produce recommendations implementable on royalty-free basis and allow technical work with minimal interruption. all working group participants must agree to license essential claims they hold on an royalty-free basis (exlusions are possible early in the develompent of a specification). for more information on the W3C's patent policy, see:

1. patent policy working group
2. W3C Patent Policy (announced may 20, 2003)

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8. Web services:

7.1 Web Services (WS):

traditional Web interaction versus Web services:
a user requests a page and receives an HTML document from a Web server	an application uses a Web services and receives an XML document

definition: a Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. its definition can be discovered by other software systems. these systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet protocols.

7.2 Web Service Description Language (WSDL):

purpose of a Web Service Description (WSD):

• WSDL documents make statements about a Web Service.
• a WSD is intended for use by a Web Service (WS) and its clients.
• it is an agreement on the syntax, datatypes and protocols they will use to interact.
• a WSD represents a "take-it-or-leave-it" contract between the interacting parties.
• it defines an interface that is potentially usable by multiple clients to interact with a particular Web service.
• the meaning of the WSD is not dependent on who uses it or how it is used.
• a WSD is described in terms of components (interface, binding, service, etc.).

7.3 implementations / examples:

TSsuite is a framework and toolset built on top of the TSpaces architecture to simplify the creation, deployment, discovery and invocation of web services based on UDDI, WSDL and SOAP. example: "printer near me". download the TSuite from IBM's alphaworks website.

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9. accessibility:

• authoring tool acessibility guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 working draft. this specification provides guidelines for Web authoring tool developers. its purpose is two-fold:
  1. to assist developers in designing authoring tools that produce accessible Web content
  2. to assist developers in creating an accessible authoring interface
  
  
  
• user agent accessibility guidelines (UAAG) 1.0 released as a W3C recommendation. this document provides guidelines for designing user agents that lower barriers to Web accessibility for people with disabilities (visual, hearing, physical, cognitive, and neurological). user agents include HTML browsers and other types of software that retrieve and render Web content. a user agent that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility through its own user interface and through other internal facilities, including its ability to communicate with other technologies (especially assistive technologies).

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10. documentation:

• the conference and poster proceedings are available from our Web server.
• W3C Track @ WWW2003

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11. other trip report's:

Please check out these other trip reports:

• trip report by roberto mazzoni (uni ZH)

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12. trip reports from previous conferences:

• trip report from the 11th WWW conference in honolulu, hawaii, 7-11 may, 2002
• trip report from the 10th WWW conference in hong kong, 1-5 may 2001
• trip report from the 9th WWW conference in amsterdam, the netherlands, 15-19 may 2000
• trip report from the 8th WWW conference in toronto, canada, 11-14 may 1999
• trip report from the 7th WWW conference in brisbane, QLD, australia, 14-18 april 1998
• trip report from the 6th WWW conference in santa clara, CA, USA, 7-11 april 1997
• trip report from the 5th WWW conference in paris, france, 6-10 may 1996
• trip report from the 4th WWW conference in boston, USA, 11-14 december 1995
• trip report from the 3rd WWW conference in darmstadt, germany, 10-14 april 1995
• sorry, but i did not attend the 2nd WWW conference in chicago, USA !
• trip report from the 1st WWW conference in geneva, switzerland, 25-27 may 1994

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production note:

this trip report was written on a IBM A31 notebook running Windows XP with Softquad HoTMetaL V6.0. this page is valid HTML 4.01 transitional.