Pearson joins the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Pearson will be the first education and publishing company to join W3C, the predominant international standards organisation for the World Wide Web.

W3C currently has 375 international members mainly technology companies, research universities and government bodies. Led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeff Jaffe, W3C's mission is to bring the Web to its full potential and to make its content accessible to all users. They are responsible for developing communication protocols and guidelines such as HTML, XML, XHTML, CGO, MathML, RDF and many others that form the building blocks for information exchange.

Pearson has created the W3C Open Linked Education Community Group in order to facilitate and create a curated subset of Wikipedia data that can be used for tagging educational content. Pearson's participation in W3C Community Groups, Business Groups, Headlights Topics and Standards Bodies will mean Pearson will be engaged in the most relevant topics to our business:

Accessibility

Digital book standards: HTML5, ePub3

MathML

Scientific Publishing

E-learning

Privacy and Do Not Track, Tacking Protection

Device APIs

"The Web has always been about publishing." said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. "Today W3C is working more closely than ever with digital publishers to ensure that the expanding Web meets industry needs. We welcome Pearson as a new member and look forward to their leadership in this work."

As we transition to digital and educational service, our primary means of delivery will be through Internet protocols. Pearson's looking forward to participating and developing these protocols to help lead the way for the education and publishing industry.