It was in August of 2014 when the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for the World Wide Web, held its first Digital Publishing Interest Group. Prior to that point, the W3C had been holding investigative meetings, trying to determine whether or not it was in the web's interest to pursue the publishing industry as a potential partner and implementer of web technology. The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) had recently revised its EPUB ebook standard, incorporating the newly-developed HTML5 functionality. It was becoming clear to W3C that unless there was some cooperation with web standards, the book publishing industry was in danger of creating less stable, proprietary standards that would ultimately be very costly for the industry to maintain, and would confuse web developers who were coming from non-book-publishing backgrounds.
Laura Dawson is CEO of Numerical Gurus, LLC, consulting company providing services to the information, librarym and book industries. Dawson has consulted to numerous organizations in these verticals, primarily focusing on solving problems related to metadata, identifiers, Linked Data, semantic web applications, and structured content.