Creating Web Representations for Places

Abstract

We believe that the future consists of nomadic people depending upon mobile appliances using World Wide Web protocols to communicate with services offered in real world places. Use of web protocols provides a ubiquitous communication infrastructure and allows interaction with the multitude of existing web-based services. Part of the challenge to realize our vision is to bridge the physical and virtual worlds by creating web representations for people, places, and things that interact virtually as they interact physically. We believe that an interesting set of new services can be provided by bridging the virtual and physical worlds in this way. This paper describes our experience with building a general place manager infrastructure useful for creating web representations for physical places. Although we leverage a general web presence architecture for building all different types of web presence, this paper focuses on the specific needs for building web representations for places.