"Ubiquitous"
Ubiquitous computing
"Everything from the family fridge to the office coffee pot—as well as heating, cooling, and security systems—will be managed through the Internet, possibly using souped-up mobile phones doubling as universal remote controls", Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP
Today’s devices will disappear. Electronics will instead be embedded in our environment, woven into our clothing, and written directly to our retinas from eyeglasses and contact lenses, predicts inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil. “Devices will no longer be spokes on the Internet—they will be the nodes themselves,” he says.
From Red Herring, April 10, 2006
The aim is to make it easier to create distributed applications that are context aware and which dynamically adapt to users, devices and the environment. These applications may involve multiple devices of widely varying capabilities. The Ubiquitous Web will reach out into the physical world of sensors and effectors. Web technologies such as markup and scripting have the potential to simplify the development of applications, providing clean abstractions on top of other technologies. This involves declarative models that encompass clients and servers, and which blurs the distinction between the two. The Ubiquitous Web is coupled to the Semantic Web through the need to describe resources for the purposes of discovery and for trust/identity relationships. This is expected to lead to work on signed RDF.
The Ubiquitous Web hides the details of how events are conveyed between devices, which should be welcome to developers struggling with today's AJAX-based applications. The higher level treatment is also essential for preserving the sandbox security model whilst allowing for eventing between multiple devices. By contrast, AJAX provides low-level access to HTTP, but is limited to the server that the Web page was downloaded from. Workshops
How can a Web application discover a resource?
An effective treatment is essential for distributed applications
More details were presented at WWW2006 in the panel session on Challenges in Web Security.
Following on from the Ubiquitous Web Workshop, 9-10 March 2006, Keio University Tokyo
Collaborative study: