NICTA principal scientist Dr Renato Iannella will co-chair a new World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Interest Group to lead discussions addressing Web user privacy issues.

The discussions will focus on how to enable significant sharing of information among while maintaining a level of control, especially how it is released into the hands of information owners.

Ideas to create a 'Policy-Aware Web' may hold the key to providing open, distributed and scaleable information across the Web, according to the W3C Policy Languages Interest Group (PLING).

Designed as a forum to support researchers, developers, solution providers, and users of policy languages, PLING aims to enable broader collaboration and set the vision for new Web experiences.

According to the W3C, PLING will primarily focus on policy languages that are already specified and broadly address the privacy, access control and obligation management areas such as XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language), P3P (W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences Project), and the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL).

The W3C is an international consortium which aims to lead the development of Web standards that will ensure the long-term growth and future directions of the Web.

Dr Iannella, a former W3C advisory board member, will co-chair the PLING group with Marco Casassa-Mont, a senior researcher from HP Laboratories, in the UK.

"The PLING will look at the next steps of the Web, examining privacy, identity, and rights policy harmonisation so that we can set the future direction of the Web," Iannella said.

"The Policy-Aware Web will deliver significant benefits to the Web community. There will be a common way to express and account for personal and enterprise information policies as Web users interact across different Web sites seamlessly."

The PLING interest group follows up on the October 2006 W3C Privacy Workshop.

PLING will run for one year and is part of the W3C's Privacy Activity which aims to promote smarter privacy tools for the Web.

The Policy Languages Interest Group is open to the public. To join visit .

National ICT Australia (NICTA) is a national research institute funded by the federal government.