Things: Web Presence

Abstract

people, places, things, location-aware computing, smart environments, ubiquitous computing The convergence of Web technology, wireless networks and portable client devices provide new opportunities for computer communications systems designs. At HP Labs we have been exploring these opportunities through an infrastructure to support "web presence " for people, places and things. Our goal is a bridge between the World Wide Web and the physical world we inhabit. This bridge includes the ability to interact with devices such as printers from a browser using standard HTTP communication. It also includes the ability to provide people, places and things – electronic or otherwise – with a web resource that is used to store information about them and which is automatically correlated with their physical presence. We aim to provide users, particularly mobile users, with support for their everyday activities, which mostly concern physical objects other than PC's. In this paper we characterize the functionality that we formulate as web presence for people, places, and things. We describe our infrastructure for web presence, and applications that demonstrate the infrastructure's viability