Integrating the Physical World with the Web to Enable Context-Enhanced Services

In Cooltown, we believe that the integration of our physical world with the Web offers unique opportunities to enable ubiquitous computing applications. This p aper describes our latest results in building a model and a software arch itecture called the Web presence manager (WPM) to support this physical -virtual integration. This software layer implements and specifies the services and information provided by Web representations of physical entities such as people, places, or things. We detail an extensive context-enhanced media-oriented application built on top of our platform. Our application enables mobile and context-aware access to personal contents and rendering on local appliances in a variety of ubiquitous computing enviro nments.