WWW-9 Highlights

Web composition related work | WAP and the Web | GM OnStar system (ubiquitous comp.)

Web composition related stuff

Aurora (IBM Almaden)

Goal is to provide task-oriented access to Web services for disabled users (e.g. allowing the blind to use a speech interface to contact a Web service).  The approach is to construct a programmatic representation of the service, let the user interact with that, and use WBI (IBM's transcoding-proxy framework) to translate between the programmatic representation and actual Web transactions.  PatML (an XML-based pattern description language, presumably developed by the authors?) is used to express the rules by which an activity on a site (e.g. choosing an element from a popup list) is translated to the formal XML representation.  The XML-based descriptions can be rendered as simple HTML, WAP, text-to-speech, etc.

The "composition" element comes from the fact that Aurora lets the user interact with any one of a number of semantically-equivalent sites (e.g. bid on same item at Yahoo, Ebay, and OnSale).  For each semantic domain there is an XML representation (e.g. "bidding sites", "stock purchasing", etc.) and within a domain, there is a ruleset per Web site.  Anita Huang (main author) claims that grouping semantically-equivalent sites into a single domain and using a particular XML DTD per-domain has been helpful.

WebEngineering.org (TeCO, Univ. Karlsruhe)

Their desire is to make the Web look something like CHAIMS (I think!), where everything is a component and all components export well-known behaviors via a method-call interface.   Pages can contain multiple components.  Because pages today are not authored this way (but are instead authored using simple layout-only authoring tools), authors propose to develop tools to parse existing HTML, "extract components" from existing pages, store the component info separately and then augment it with method information.  They do not appear to have actually developed these tools yet, and they don't expect that the tools will be 100% automatic.

The main difference between their approach and ours is granularity: their grain of addressable entity is the component, which can be quite small and maybe dozens on a page, whereas our grain is the whole autonomous service.  I think our approach fits better with composition of existing services since it's easier to reason about the behavior of the overall entity over time and track changes in the service interface than it is to identify "components" inside the entity and track changes in individual components over time.

• Gellersen, Wicke & Gaedke paper on WCML (Web Composition Markup Language) and composition model described above
• Some articles on applying O-O design to the Web

WAP-wide-web panel

Two totally distinct sets of topics: (a) technology issues (HDML vs WML, etc); (b) overall site structure and UE vs Web-specific UE. Panelists:

• Gabriel Montenegro, Sun (pilc)
• Josh Cohen, Microsoft
• Dave Raggett, W3C/HPL
• Bruce Martin, VP Prod Dev, Phone.com
• Johan Hjelm W3C/Ericsson
• Rohit Khare, 4K Assoc (will be a Mobicom 2000 panelist too)

The panel was explicitly not intended to discuss whether it was justified for Phone.com to do a separate forum rather than deal with IETF/W3C.  The moderator was embarrassingly apologetic for phone.com, saying that "there is a $5b company there, and their advantage and size might have something to do with a proprietary technical advantage" -- sick.  Happily, Bruce Martin deflected this.

• Will we be stuck with a "WML ghetto" (now) or "XHTML ghetto" later?
• "XHTML is only part of the answer...need to focus on user experience...must be open to multiple higher-level formats to enable new models including VXML, etc..."

Summary points:

• Use XML+XSL, etc..."It's cheap and relatively simple" to do multidevice targeting if you've thought about your site as structure rather than content.  See paper in Mobile Access section from IBM Tokyo on guided transcoding.  XHTML is a fine presentaiton language but not a good structural one.
• The bigger problem is driving the user experience on these devices.  It's folly to believe that "if existing Web authoring tools 'supported' XML, we'd get WAP free".
• Content providers tend to want to optimize for the platform (typically they fight against cross-platform standards since these reduce the predictability of presentation to the end user).  This is cultural and can't be solved only by technology, and it's getting worse since users will have more choices for presentation rather than fewer.
• There are other UE lessons, such as effect of latency on user's perception of site trustworthiness, that are equally important.  One panelist claimed that this is a reason to deprecate proxies--you lose control of the UE.  I disagree, it depends what the proxy does.

Things to think about:

• Do we even have a "UE language"?  Maybe the interaction model can be separated from the data model in a declarative way...this is something we should think about in the context of composition--both involve designing one's own interaction with a bunch of content.
• This forces site designers to ask why users would come to their site in the first place, and design the interaction around the task.

Questions from audience

• Suppose I want to serve something simple, like directions to my office, to a phone.   What else do I need to provide?  It should be trivial to use this information as input to something else, e.g. so user can use it to get driving directions or traffic from their favorite site, etc.
• I wanted to ask about how all this versioning stuff will fall out (HDML, WML 1.1, WML 1.2, I heard a ref to WML 2.0).  Phones have long design cycles--will I replace it all the time, re-flash it, should I now expect buggy software updates to crash it, etc.?   But I never got to ask...the panelists were too busy discussing among themselves to take questions.  (At most 2 questions were asked)
• "Where we are now" is irrelevant.  "$5B valuation" is irrelevant; witness Netscape.  What matters is coming up with a long term solution for a device-independent Web. "WAP-wide web" is provincial and arrogant.   (Murray Maloney, Muzmo Comm., organizing member of WWW-9)

Mobile Web marketing (???, PriceWaterhouseCoopers)

"Mobile internet convergence" includes WAP, iMode/jMode, etc. - anything that gives Internet access to non-PC's

• WAP seen as a transitional technology until devices get better
• 50 kb/s GSM/GPSR on the horizon for end of this year
• Typical cell phone lifetime is 27 months; hence, 27 months after Jan 2001 (by which time all shipping phones will be WAP-enabled), every cell phone user will be WAP-enabled
• 55% of iMode usage in Japan is games/entertainment

Ubiquitous computing related

GM Onstar system

This is a "platform" for delivering voice, data, etc. services to a driver while driving a car.  The UI consists of one or two buttons, microphone, speaker.    Current implementation: you press the button and are connected (via cellular) to an "advisor" who is your personal assistant.  There is also a big red button that connects you to 911.  The platform can tap into various car systems in at least two ways:

1. Use other car devices - radio, etc. - for I/O.  This enables use of programmatic data services in the future, in addition to human-assisted.  There are also sensors connected to various things like airbags, etc. so the system can automatically detect if you've had an accident and call 911 for you.
2. Limited control path into the car.  E.g. if system detects airbags have blown up, the remote advisor can direct your car to unlock its doors so that assistance can get in, flash the headlights and horn to get attention, etc.  I had some concerns about security here (imagine someone figuring out how to hack this!) but I was assured that their security was "extremely strong and extremely proprietary".  Boo, hiss.

Interesting points about OnStar:

• Driver's environment dominates design choices: common simple UI's, minimal distraction from main task of driving, etc. - a good model for cell phone services and other ubicomp.
• Currently: cell phone + GPS + integration w/vehicle systems (both sensors and actuators!).  Services provided by human advisors on call.  Future: platform for delivery of services to driver.  Some services will be automated (eg personalized Internet-based content delivery with voice triggering).
• Note, GM controls both the network and the platform!  So, if you want to offer your own service through OnStar, you have to go through them.  They claimed OnStar was an "open architecture", which seems to conflict with this.  When I asked the speaker, he capitulated and said they do intend to keep their lead as a service provider (read: stranglehold on the network...just like the phone companies.) 

This last point was ironic because Larry Lessig's keynote made exactly this comparison between wired/cell phone companies and the Internet: in one case the network is centrally controlled and you have to get cooperation from the operator to deploy new services, in the other case the network is not centrally controlled and anyone can offer a new service without anyone else's permission or cooperation.