Keynote Presenter: Bob Hopgood <frah@w3.org>

Keynote Title: W3C: Leading the Web to its Full Potential

This keynote will give some background information concerning the World-Wide Web Consortium, its origins, objectives, structure and current situation. This will be followed by an overview of what has been achieved to date and discuss the current and future activities particularly with regard to the family of XML standards, and also XML applications such as XHTML, SMIL, SVG, and RDF.

Presenters Bio:
Professor Bob Hopgood was until quite recently Associate Director at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) with specific interests in computer graphics and the World-Wide Web. RAL was one of the earlist UK Organisations to join W3C and submissions from RAL to W3C were instrumental in getting both a Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) web profile and an activity in scalable vector graphics (SVG) started. He is also a Professor at Brunel University, UK where he currently teaches a Masters Course on Web topics. He has been involved in international standards activities for the last 25 years and is currently involved with the ISO standardisation of PNG. He is a member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) that organises the WWW Series of Conferences and was Programme Chair for WWW5 in Paris in May 1996.

A joint RAL/INRIA European project from 1997 to 1999 provided a number of demonstrators for European industry related to W3C standards. He managed the RAL side of the project and was responsible for the setting up of a number of W3C Offices in Europe. He retired from RAL in April this year and is now Head of Offices at W3C.

Conference Chair's note. Bob will be present for the entire conference so delegates wishing to discuss W3C issues in detail will have ample opportunity of meet and talk with Bob.