It is my pleasure and privilege to welcome you to the official opening ceremony of the W3C Hungarian Office. This is an important and expensive day - especially when taking into account the catering trade quality prices of the MTA headquarters -, and this is a reason why the Office will work within the organization and with the financial support of MTA SZTAKI, the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

I would not like to emphasize the significance and role of the World Wide Web - other presenters will probably do this and I think those who came to this event are more or less have a clear view about it. Regarding SZTAKI I just would like to mark that it is the nation's biggest IT research and development institute employing 200 researchers, 70 of whom hold a scientific degree and the rest of them are lucky young researchers who are going to get a degree in the future. Because the Web is an important area of informatics an outstanding department works on this theme with high quality results in the Institute.

How did the Consortium and SZTAKI get in touch? The W3C was established by the MIT in 1994 with INRIA as its first European partner, which is a twin-institute of us in ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics). SZTAKI has been a member of the Consortium since 1998, which in now days has more than 500 members and 60 full time employees in various countries. Starting from the beginning of the next year the European working group will organizationally move from INRIA to ERCIM. In many European countries the ERCIM-institutes operate the local W3C offices and following this train of thought established SZTAKI the Hungarian Office.

The W3C itself is involved in the development and sepcification of indistry-standars and the goal of offices such as ours is to disseminate these results among the professionals as well as to induce companies and universities to join the W3C efforts. In exchange for the information those joining the consortium only need to pay a moderate fee, which per se will not be enough for the self-maintenance of the Office (with special regard to the catering trade quality prices of the MTA headquarters) for a long time, that's why SZTAKI's informatics culture missionary background is necessary.

I hope today's program will provide you with lots of interesting information and I wish everyone a fruitful day and tasty fresh sandwhiches!