18th World Wide Web Conference, Madrid
Panel chair: M.T. Carrasco Benitez,
Carrasco{at}MultilingualWebSites{dot}org
Room M2 - 14:30-16:00 - Thursday, 23 April 2009 - Photos
Multilingual Web Sites (MWS) refers to sites with multilingual parallel texts; e.g., Europa, the portal of the European Union. For details on this subject, it is recommended reading the (draft) chair memo Open architecture for multilingual web sites. MWS are of great practical relevance: the call for proposals for Multilingual Web has a budget of 14 millions euros; since 2007 and for the first time, the European Commission has a Commissioner for Multilingualism (Mr. Leonard Orban).
There is an urgent need to address the standardization of MWS:
All parties (i.e., panelists, participants and non-participants) are encouraged to comment the chair memo and/or to submit short position papers by emailing to the above address. The intention is to have active participants and not passive listeners. All contributions will be accepted and put online. Of particular interest would be implementations (running code wins). Authors of the most relevant contributions will be invited to do very short presentations. Microphone queue will be available, so participants could intervene at any time. The intention is to have a very interactive event: more like a workshop than a panel.
MWS is a subject with pedigree: in 1996, there was a track on this subject at the Web Internationalization & Multilinguism Symposium in Seville: hopefully, the long march from Seville could finally end in Madrid with a rough consensus to drive forward the standardization process.
Panel chair. He works in language technology and in particular in multilingual parallel texts. He met the Web at the beginning of the 90s due to his NeXT Cube. At the Third WWW Confenrence (1995), organizer of a BOF on Multilingual normalization (the first event on multilingual web). Soon after, he started the WInter mailing list, that became the W3C I18N mailing list. Chairman of the Web I18N & Multilinguism Symposium (1996) and track rapporteur for Site developement; i.e., the same subject of this panel. Active participant in most WWW conferences (track and panel chairman, panelist, BOF organizer, poster author, note editor); e.g., BOF organizer at WWW2008 on Multilingual Web Sites. Spanish from Seville based in Luxembourg, fluent in English and French, good Italian and fair German. B.Sc. Computers & Maths, University of London.
A long time Mozilla community member. Pascal created several end-user support resources and participated in the creation of two Spanish-speaking Mozilla-related community portals. In 2005, he wrote a French book about Firefox & Thunderbird. Pascal is currently in charge of Web localization and community development with a specific focus on Spain where he is a spokesperson for the Mozilla project. Pascal speaks English, French, Spanish and some Catalan.
He has been working in the web publishing world, specially in Java, since 1998. He is member of the Apache Software Foundation and has been VP Apache Portals for some years. He is very interested in how to develop sustainable communities, "a la" open source, in enterprise settings, and also in spreading the best habits of such communities, like written, asynch communications and source code management tools, into the general enterprises. He is also an Associate Professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, GSyC department.
As W3C Internationalization Activity Lead, Richard Ishida is trying to make the World Wide Web world wide. The Internationalization Activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organizations to help ensure universal access to the Web, regardless of language, script or culture. Richard has also increased internationalization-related education and outreach while at the W3C. He is on the Unicode Conference board, and the Unicode Editorial Committee.
Chief Standards Officer at Opera Software, the Norwegian browser company. He is responsible for managing their extensive involvement in contributing to and developing standards in areas ranging from improved capabilities of mobile browsers to development of the next generation of Javascript. His own work in the area focuses on Information Managment and User Interaction technologies (e.g. HTML, RDF, SVG), and the APIs that make the Web a more interesting platform for User Interfaces and applications. Before joining Opera in 2005 he worked for 6 years as a member of staff for W3C, and prior to that had a range of jobs from producing a website in multiple european and asian languages to ensuring accessibility of government Web systems for people with disabilities. He is from Australia, speaks Spanish and French about as well as English, and a little of many other languages living and dead. He is based in Getafe (Madrid).
CTO of soitu.es.
Software Engineer from the University of Oviedo.
Collaborator with nginx.
During 3 years, Raul worked in the Department of Mathematics of University of Oviedo, mainly involved with image digital treatment and 3D model generation. In this period, Raul was part of the team that installed one of the first Gopher servers in Spain and the second Web server.
In 1994, Raul becomes responsible of the Scholarship Information System and development of the University's Web. In 1997, he starts managing the team responsible for the systems controlling University Access and most of the Information Servers in the University. During this period, Raul starts collaboration with Satec in the development of Engineer and Implementation studies for different Cable companies in Spain.
In 2000, Raul was named CTO of elmundo.es (the bigest spanish news site), where he developed a complete reorganization of the team creating a scalable structure with internal R&D and based in open-source.
In 2007, Raul participates in the founding team of soitu.es, a startup news site. From his position as CTO, Raul evangelizes, promotes the use of open software and realeases code and knowledge from soitu.es.
Last updated: 27 April 2009.