The Incubator Activity is closed (April 2012). In 6 years, W3C Members started 28 Incubator Groups. A significant proportion of Incubator Groups resulted in Recommendation Track work.
The Incubator Activity provided valuable experience on which W3C has built a more solid and more inclusive program, Community and Business Groups. Anyone can propose a Community Group, anyone may join at no cost, groups start quickly, participants contribute materials under a Royalty-Free patent license and permissive copyright, groups have no chartered end date. W3C provides participants a more useful (and growing) set of collaborative tools, and more.
The W3C Incubator Activity fosters rapid development, on a time scale of a year or less, of new Web-related concepts. Target concepts include innovative ideas for specifications, guidelines, and applications that are not (or not yet) clear candidates as Web standards developed through the more thorough process afforded by the W3C Recommendation Track. Advantages of the Incubator Activity include:
The Incubator Activity is being operated on an experimental basis, and will be reviewed periodically with the W3C Membership. If it proves to be useful, all or elements of the concepts being tested could be incorporated into future versions of the W3C Process Document.
Note: Before 1 August 2009, W3C published XG news on this page and on the W3C home page (and thus in the News Archive). As of 1 August 2009, news will no longer be published/archived on this page.
2009-06-17: W3C today launched the Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group, whose mission is to help enhance and standardize the architecture of the World Wide Web by facilitating the highest quality standards and best practice based education for future generations of Web professionals. See the full news item.
2009-04-06: W3C today launched the Social Web Incubator Group, whose mission is to understand the systems and technologies that permit the description and identification of people, groups, organizations, and user-generated content in extensible and privacy-respecting ways. See the full news item.
2008-12-04: W3C today launched the Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group, whose mission is to begin the formal process of producing ontologies that define the capabilities of sensors and sensor networks, and to develop semantic annotations of a key language used by services based sensor networks. See the full news item.
2009-02-10: The RDB2RDF Incubator Group published their final report. Read the full news item.
2008-11-25: The Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group published their final report. Read the full news item.
2008-10-27: W3C launched the Model-based User Interfaces Incubator Group to evaluate research on model-based user interface design as a framework for authoring Web applications and with a view to proposing work on related standards.
2008-06-24: W3C launched the Common Web Language Evaluation and Installation Incubator Group to evaluate the CWL language from multilingualism, semantic computing and semantic web points of view. Based on these evaluation and feedback, the CWL and its platform will stand up in actual use in the Web; see the news story.
2008-05-01: W3C launched the Product Modelling Incubator Group today to define a small core of basic classes and properties for product modelling; see the news story.
2008-04-15: The Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web Incubator Group published their final report.; see the news story.
2008-04-15: The Common Web Language Incubator Group published their final report; see the news story.
2008-04-09: W3C launched the Rich Web Application Backplane Incubator Group today to explore and refine the architecture of a "Rich Web Application Backplane" -- a set of common building blocks for Web applications. (News archive)
2008-03-04: W3C launched the RDB2RDF Incubator Group today to Study Mapping Relational Data into RDF. The mission of this Incubator Group is twofold: (1) to examine and classify existing approaches to mapping relational data into RDF and assess whether standardization is possible and/or necessary in this area, and (2) to examine and classify existing approaches to mapping OWL classes to Relational data, or, more accurately, SQL queries, moving towards the goal of defining a standard in this area. (News archive)
2008-12-04: W3C closed the SWS Testbed Incubator Group today; see the group's SWS Challenge Testbed Incubator Methodology Report.
2007-12-11: W3C launched the Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group today to review and analyse the current state-of-the-art in vocabularies used in emergency management functions and to investigate the path forward via an emergency management systems information interoperability framework. (News archive)
2007-11-29: W3C launched the Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group today with a new charter. (News archive)
2007-10-31: W3C published two Incubator Reports from the Geospatial XG titled Geospatial Vocabulary and Geospatial Ontologies. (News archive)
2007-08-16: W3C published an Incubator Report from the Multimedia Semantics XG titled Image Annotation on the Semantic Web. (News archive)
2007-07-25: W3C published an Incubator Report from the Multimedia Semantics XG titled Multimedia Vocabularies on the Semantic Web. (News archive)
2007-02-20: W3C published the Final Report of the (First) W3C Emotion Incubator Group. (News archive)
2007-02-05: W3C launches the Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web Incubator Group. (News archive)
2007-02-05: W3C launches the SWS Testbed Incubator Group. (News archive)
2007-02-20: W3C published the Final Report of the W3C Content Label Incubator Group: W3C Content Labels. (News archive)
2006-11-06: W3C launches the Common Web Language Incubator Group. (News archive)
2006-07-19: W3C launches the Emotion Incubator Group. (News archive)
2006-07-05: W3C launches the Geospatial Incubator Group. (News archive)
2006-04-25: W3C launches the Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group. (News archive)
2006-02-08: W3C launches the Incubator Activity. Read the press release. (News archive)