Web’s Open Standards Body Taking Detailed Look At Digital Signage

June 5, 2012 by Dave Haynes

The body that somewhat guides the development of open standards for the web is taking a serious look at web-based digital signage, and running a special workshop about it next week, in conjunction with the Digital Signage Japan trade show.

W3C, aka the World Wide Web Consortium, says this about the June 14-15 event in greater Tokyo:

The Web is at a turning point with the emergence of the Open Web Platform, the set of technologies used to create highly interactive experiences and social apps on a broad range of devices. W3C has helped foster the deployment of Web technology on mobile devices and, for the past two years, has made the convergence of Web and TV a priority (see the Web and TV Interest Group). We now see an opportunity to extend the Web to a new class of devices: very large digital displays, such as those found in New York’s Times Square or at many sporting events. 

W3C is organizing a workshop to share perspectives, business use cases, and technology requirements so that the Open Web Platform can be used on digital displays – large and small. We invite operators of consumer electronics companies, digital signage platforms, advertisers, browser vendors, sign owners, and others to participate in this discussion.

Final discussion topics are still being worked out, but these are some of the areas expected to be discussed:

• A survey of existing integration of Web technologies and digital signage technologies
• Demonstrating the advantages of Web-based digital signage system
• Standardization of Web-based frameworks for the development of Web-based signage system
• Standardization of the semantics and syntaxes (e.g. XML syntaxes) of possible Web-based signage system
• Relationship between existing digital signage systems and W3C/non-W3C Web standards
• The role of Web-based signage approaches for improving the quality and reducing cost
• The role of Web-based approaches for improving the accessibility
• Requirements for extensions to the existing standards, e.g., HTML, to improve the support of signage
• Plans to support Web-based technologies, e.g., HTML5, what kind of additional standards are needed.
• Re-use of existing W3C/non-W3C markup languages for light-weight signage services

As you might expect the activity is largely being driven by people in that region, but there are some serious companies involved, such as NTT, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Hitachi, Toshiba, IAdea and Walt Disney, as well as the Fraunhofer Institute.

Couldn’t even imagine the cost to get over for that, but my excuse will be I’m in Lost Wages for InfoComm.