Machine learning (ML), and especially its subset deep learning, are being successfully used in native platforms in advanced computationally-heavy areas such as image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing. The mission of the Web Machine Learning Community Group (WebML CG) is to make Machine Learning a first-class web citizen by incubating Web APIs for machine learning inference in the browser and in products using modern web engines.
This Community Group will develop Web APIs to enable the creation of machine learning web experiences that are embeddable in the Web of today, and enable progressive enhancement of existing web applications and frameworks.
Historically, the Web has been unable to support advanced on-device machine learning use cases in a performant manner due in part to lack of optimized low-level APIs for machine learning. Recent advancements in the hardware-accelerated low-level APIs for neural network inference have demonstrated feasibility and informed work on complementary higher-level task-specific APIs.
Following the precepts of the Extensible Web Manifesto, higher-level task-specific APIs can be implemented in terms of the low-level APIs that use custom models downloaded over the network. To complement this approach, the Community Group will incubate selected task-specific APIs to enable reuse of the built-in models that are distributed as part of the browser or the underlying software platform.
The scope of work for this Community Group extends beyond the current scope of the Web Machine Learning Working Group. Deliverables incubated in this Community Group may graduate to the Working Group for standardization.
The APIs in scope of this group will not be tied to any particular platform and will be implementable on top of existing major platform APIs, such as Android Neural Networks API, Windows DirectML, and macOS/iOS Metal Performance Shaders and Basic Neural Network Subroutines.
Each specification should detail all known security and privacy implications for implementers, Web authors, and end users.
Web Neural Network API has graduated to the Web Machine Learning Working Group.
A low-level Web API for neural network inference hardware acceleration that:
A set of higher-level APIs that:
A general-purpose API to prompt a language model directly using common prompting techniques to accomplish a variety of tasks, including:
The scope is limited to development of interfaces that expose inference capabilities of the modern platforms beneficial or purpose-built for ML. Training capabilities are out of scope due to limited availability of respective platform APIs.
This Community Group will not define any hardware features or algorithms.
To avoid overlap with existing work, generic primitives used by traditional machine learning algorithms such as base linear algebra operations are out of scope. The WebGL and WebGPU shaders and WebAssembly SIMD are expected to address these requirements, see the Coordination section for details.
This Community Group does not attempt to mandate a specific neural network or Machine Learning model schema or format. Other groups are expected to address these requirements of this evolving area.
The group may produce other Community Group Reports within the scope of this charter but that are not Specifications, for instance use cases, requirements, or white papers.
The group MAY produce test suites to support the Specifications. Please see the GitHub LICENSE file for test suite contribution licensing information.
Technical coordination with the following Groups is expected:
The group operates under the Community and Business Group Process. Terms in this Charter that conflict with those of the Community and Business Group Process are void.
As with other Community Groups, W3C seeks organizational licensing commitments under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA). When people request to participate without representing their organization's legal interests, W3C will in general approve those requests for this group with the following understanding: W3C will seek and expect an organizational commitment under the CLA starting with the individual's first request to make a contribution to a group Deliverable. The section on Contribution Mechanics describes how W3C expects to monitor these contribution requests.
The W3C Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct applies to participation in this group.
The group will not publish Specifications on topics other than those listed under Specifications above. See below for how to modify the charter.
Substantive Contributions to Specifications can only be made by Community Group Participants who have agreed to the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
Specifications created in the Community Group must use the W3C Software and Document License. All other documents produced by the group should use that License where possible.
Community Group participants agree to make all contributions in the GitHub repo the group is using for the particular document. This may be in the form of a pull request (preferred), by raising an issue, or by adding a comment to an existing issue.
All Github repositories attached to the Community Group must contain a copy of the CONTRIBUTING and LICENSE files.
The group will conduct all of its technical work in public. If the group uses GitHub, all technical work will occur in its GitHub repositories (and not in mailing list discussions). This is to ensure contributions can be tracked through a software tool.
Meetings may be restricted to Community Group participants, but a public summary or minutes must be posted to the group's public mailing list, or to a GitHub issue if the group uses GitHub.
This group will seek to make decisions where there is consensus. Groups are free to decide how to make decisions (e.g. Participants who have earned Committer status for a history of useful contributions assess consensus, or the Chair assesses consensus, or where consensus isn't clear there is a Call for Consensus [CfC] to allow multi-day online feedback for a proposed course of action). It is expected that participants can earn Committer status through a history of valuable contributions as is common in open source projects. After discussion and due consideration of different opinions, a decision should be publicly recorded (where GitHub is used as the resolution of an Issue).
If substantial disagreement remains (e.g. the group is divided) and the group needs to decide an Issue in order to continue to make progress, the Committers will choose an alternative that had substantial support (with a vote of Committers if necessary). Individuals who disagree with the choice are strongly encouraged to take ownership of their objection by taking ownership of an alternative fork. This is explicitly allowed (and preferred to blocking progress) with a goal of letting implementation experience inform which spec is ultimately chosen by the group to move ahead with.
Any decisions reached at any meeting are tentative and should be recorded in a GitHub Issue for groups that use GitHub and otherwise on the group's public mail list. Any group participant may object to a decision reached at an online or in-person meeting within 7 days of publication of the decision provided that they include clear technical reasons for their objection. The Chairs will facilitate discussion to try to resolve the objection according to the decision process.
It is the Chairs' responsibility to ensure that the decision process is fair, respects the consensus of the CG, and does not unreasonably favour or discriminate against any group participant or their employer.
Participants in this group choose their Chair(s) and can replace their Chair(s) at any time using whatever means they prefer. However, if 5 participants, no two from the same organisation, call for an election, the group must use the following process to replace any current Chair(s) with a new Chair, consulting the Community Development Lead on election operations (e.g., voting infrastructure and using RFC 2777).
Participants dissatisfied with the outcome of an election may ask the Community Development Lead to intervene. The Community Development Lead, after evaluating the election, may take any action including no action.
The group can decide to work on a proposed amended charter, editing the text using the Decision Process described above. The decision on whether to adopt the amended charter is made by conducting a 30-day vote on the proposed new charter. The new charter, if approved, takes effect on either the proposed date in the charter itself, or 7 days after the result of the election is announced, whichever is later. A new charter must receive 2/3 of the votes cast in the approval vote to pass. The group may make simple corrections to the charter such as deliverable dates by the simpler group decision process rather than this charter amendment process. The group will use the amendment process for any substantive changes to the goals, scope, deliverables, decision process or rules for amending the charter.