Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has joined the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C.

Started in 1994, W3C is an international group where member organizations, W3C staff and the public work together to develop web standards.

The first contribution to the consortium of the Department of Energy's national lab in Richland will be to serve on the W3C Provenance Working Group, which is developing standard formats to identify the methods taken to gather data that is shared on the web. The laboratory plans to contribute to other W3C working groups as opportunities arise.

"Modern science produces massive amounts of data every day and organizations like W3C help scientists like myself find better ways to organize and share that data on the web," said Eric Stephan, who represents PNNL on the W3C committee, in a statement. "

More than 325 organizations are W3C members, including Microsoft Corporation, IBM Corporation, Google, Inc., and Facebook. PNNL is the third U.S. national laboratory to join W3C.