Definition: W3C

(World Wide Web Consortium) An international industry consortium founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee to develop standards for the Web. It is hosted in the U.S. by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.

More than 400 organizations worldwide are involved, and members work on projects called "Activities." The W3C has standardized many of the fundamental technologies of the Web, including HTML and XML, URLs and URIs, the SOAP protocol and the P3P privacy description.