Proposed Group: Meta-Layer Infrastructure Community Group [via Community and Business Groups]

The Meta-Layer Infrastructure Community Group has been proposed by Daveed Benjamin:






Mission

The Meta-Layer Infrastructure Community Group will explore and advance protocols, design patterns, and shared standards for the interface layer of the Web—where people interact through browsers and overlays. Our goal is to support the emergence of a trusted, decentralized, civic infrastructure above Today’s Web, enabling contextual trust, coordination, and visible presence across communities and applications.

This group may publish Specifications.

Scope


This group will investigate and propose solutions in the following areas:



Overlay coexistence and spatial protocol zones: Guidance for how browser extensions, tooltips, and overlays can avoid collisions (e.g., multiple extensions competing for the lower right corner), and how to foster cooperative behaviors across interface-layer tools.

Contextual annotation and semantic overlays: Building on existing Web Annotation standards, we will explore how communities can layer interpretable, contextual meaning on top of existing content—including the use of shared ontologies, tagged trust signals, and localized interpretation layers.

Presence and trust signaling at the interface layer: How to represent people, groups, and values in a transparent and auditable way, including live annotations, endorsements, and role-aware overlays—without requiring centralized backends.

Interface-level AI alignment: Proposals for grounding, auditing, and co-governing AI tools that operate at the interface (e.g., summarizers, guides, fact-checkers), including how overlays can provide context, source-trails, and counterfactuals.

Digital artifact recognition and integrity: Defining how communities and systems might represent and verify digital artifacts (e.g., credentials, publications, declarations) at the interface layer using open standards—without presupposing any specific backend architecture.



Deliverables

A specification or design guide for overlay interoperability and spatial etiquette

Proposed extensions or usage conventions for Web Annotations and trust-layer metadata

Pattern libraries for presence-based interaction and integrity signaling

Draft interface standards for AI overlays and civic contextualization

Community dialogue around digital artifact integrity and use-case alignment



Participation


Open to standards developers, civic technologists, browser extension authors, Web annotation experts, trust & safety practitioners, and communities interested in building shared public infrastructure across the Web.






 You are invited to support the creation of this group.
 Once the group has a total of 5 supporters, it will be launched and people can join to begin work. In order to support the group, you will need a W3C account.




Once launched, the group will no longer be listed as "proposed"; it will be in the list of current groups.




 If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please send us email on site-comments@w3.org




Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team



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'Proposed Group: Meta-Layer Infrastructure Community Group'

https://www.w3.org/community/blog/2025/06/13/proposed-group-meta-layer-infrastructure-community-group/



Learn more about the Community and Business Groups: 

https://www.w3.org/community

Received on Friday, 13 June 2025 16:26:01 UTC