ANU picked to house web consortium office

The Australian National University has been selected to host the local office of the World Wide Web Consortium, the global organisation that develops technical web standards.

ANU Canberra campus.
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W3C, which counts major online players such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Google as members, said ANU beat out other universities and non-profit organisations, to host the Australian office after a comprehensive review.

Dr Armin Haller of ANU's College of Business and Economics will be the manager of the Australian W3C office.

Haller has been involved with W3C as the organisation's point of contact in Australia for the past few years and has a background in computer science and web standards.

Through W3C Australia, Haller will aim to promote research into web payments, digital publishing, linked open data and security, ANU said in a statement.

W3C Australia will be jointly hosted by the business and economics and engineering and computer science colleges at ANU's campus in Acton, Canberra.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the world wide web and its underlying Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, founded W3C in 1994 at the Massachusett Institute of Technology, with funding from the United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European Commission.

The organisation has a staff of 62 and oversees the maintenance of existing web standards and the development of new ones such as version 5 of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML5).

It aims to enforce compatibility and interoperability to further the broadening of the web into new areas of society, academia, government and business.

Currently, W3C oversees around 345 technical standards and has offices worldwide.