Late last year, participation in the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Oil, Gas & Chemicals Business Group (OGCBG) dropped below critical mass and has been shut down. The group has published an analysis of what went wrong and a possible path forward. One problem was the $10,000 per company cost of membership (only Statoil and Chevron were prepared to pony up). Some thought that the subject matter of the business group was already covered in existing industry forums.
One way forward for the now 17 individual-strong unit is to downsize to a W3C ‘community group.’ The advantage here is no membership fee. But, according to the OGCBG analysis, there is an obstacle to this move as it would expose the group’s semantic reflections to the scrutiny of ‘the media.’ The current state of the group is that it is billed as a ‘community group.’ Read the OGCBG’s plaintive swan song.
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