[Mirrored from: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/International/Sevilla-96/]

Web Internationalization & Multilinguism Symposium
Hotel Alcora
Carretera de San Juan de Aznalfarache-Mairena, Km 1
Sevilla, Spain.
20-22 November 1996

background	registration	programme	travel	sponsors

Introduction

The objective of the Symposium is the advancement of the Internationalization & Multilinguism of the Web; it will cover both the current state and needed future developments. In particular, the symposium is intended to promote agreement on relevant technical standards. The intent is to gather interested parties from all sectors, including:

• Users, particularly site developers with large multi-lingual needs.
• Implementors of Web products (e.g., browsers, servers, authoring tools, ...).
• Vendors of linguistic products (e.g., translator workbenches).
• Standards developers (e.g, W3C).
• Social and political stake-holders (e.g., European Commission)

The Symposium is organized into five broad domains. Each domain has one or more rapporteurs, who will organize a section of the symposium in which the current status, options, and issues are presented and discussed. Each domain has a separate web page, which will be updated to point to position statements and background papers. Those with a strong interest who are new to the issues of Internationalization and Multilinguism of the web are encouraged to attend.

There will be one Main Track and a number of parallel Secondary Tracks. All subjects will be treated, to different extents, as part of the Main Track. The Secondary Tracks will be used for extending discussions on certain themes. There will be no fixed model for events on Secondary Tracks, which can take the form of workshops, brainstorming sessions, BOF meetings, vendors demonstrations/tutorials,...

Honorary Chairman

Manuel Chavez Gonzalez, President of the Government of Andalusia.

Main Track program

Wednesday 20 November

• 9.00 Opening Address of the Symposium. M.T. Carrasco Benitez.
• 9.10 Keynote Speaker. Representative of the Government of Andalucia
• 9.35-13.00 1. Social, political and cultural aspects
  Domain rapporteur: Patrice Husson
  This domain covers goals and issues around web internationalization, including social, economic, political, cultural, legal, censorship and linguistic issues, including the global functional view required for the internationalization and multilinguism of the Web.
  • 10.50-11.10 coffee
  • 13.00 lunch
• 14.30-18.00 2. Basic infrastructure
  Domain rapporteur: L. Masinter
  This domain covers the international and multi-lingual issues of protocols and protocol elements underlying the Web. Topics include language tags, character sets and encodings, MIME registration, URLs, HTTP, Internet directory services.
  • 16.20-16.40 coffee

Thursday 21 November

• 9.00-13.00 3. Authoring
  Domain rapporteurs: M. Dürst, G. Nicol, F. Yergeau
  This domain covers the technology important for authors, including the internationalization issues of HTML, BIDI, undisplayable characters, fonts, multi-lingual typography, style sheets, and localization.
  • 10.50-11.10 coffee 13.00 lunch
• 14.30-18.00 4. Site development
  Domain rapporteur: M.T. Carrasco Benitez
  This domain covers the technology necessary for developing and maintaining multi-lingual web sites, including translation and translation tools, parallel hypertext, multi-lingual hypertext, multi-lingual search and natural language processing. Also the processing of EDI.
  • 16.20-16.40 coffee
  • 19.30 Social evening

Friday 22 November

• 9.00-12.40 5. Deployment
  Domain rapporteur: Bert Bos
  This domain covers the current state of web software, servers and sites, and the issues of deployment: for example, how to encourage authors to use features and servers to support those features and browsers to interpret those features, since the willingness of each of them depends on how widespread the technology is in the other communities.
  • 10.50 coffee
• 12.40 Closing address
• 13.00 Lunch

Only the internationalization and multilinguism aspect of the above subject will be considered.

Comments on the program are encouraged; particularly missing aspects. Participants should submit a short statement. Comments and statement should be send to the internationalization mailing list. For Details on this list.

Registration

The registration is administered by Sadiel.

The fees are:

• $450 : Until 31 October 1996
• $500 : After 31 October 1996

This is for the Symposium, printed material, lunches and coffees.

Traveling & accommodation

The Symposium will be in Sevilla, Spain.

Participants are to make their own travel and accommodations arrangements. Some information is in the Symposium travel and accommodation server.

Language

The language of the Symposium is English. There will be simultaneous translation English/Spanish and Spanish/English for the Main Track.

Organization

The Symposium is co-organized by Sadiel and the World Wide Web Consortium. It has the support of the European Commission, as part of the European contribution to the G7 Project "A Global Marketplace for SMEs". The chairman of the Symposium is M.T. Carrasco Benitez.

M.T. Carrasco Benitez
Webmaster
Last updated 7 November 1996.