The Web as Unifying Force in Europe

Jean-François Abramatic

W3C10 Europe

3 June 2004

The Web as Unifying Force in Europe

Dan Applequist (Vodafone) - Where the Web meets Mobile Telecommunications

Richard Ishida (W3C) - The Challenge of Internationalization

Keith Jeffery (ERCIM) - GRIDs and the World Wide Web

Moderator: Jean-François Abramatic (ILOG)

Where the Web meets Mobile Telecommunications

Dan Applequist, Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone Group Services Limited

The Past of the Web –A Personal Perspective

• History linked to High-Energy Physics
• 1991: Paul Ginsparg’sarXivpreprint service (LaTeX)
• 1994: the Year the Web started to make headlines; W3C
• Scientific publishers running scared
• E-Doc: created to bring these publishers on-line
  • Worked with Nature, AAAS (Science), American Physical Society, Springer-Verlag, etc.
  • Maintained the “Electronic Journals”section of the WWW Virtual Library
  • E-Doc subsequently sold to CadmusJournal Systems in Baltimore
  • Surprise: the world didn’t explode!
    • Scientific journals are still here and have embraced electronic distribution –peer review didn’t go away
    • Electronic pre-print services such as arXivstill thrive and are essential to their communities

Fast Forward

• Are content providers still scared of cannibalizing their traditional revenue streams?
  • Yes, but the focus has shifted to Music, Movies, etc.
• Meanwhile, “The Web”has evolved
  • Ubiquitous in peoples’lives –people who have computers
  • People less say “I am going to use the Web” but say “I’ll check it on Amazon” or “I’ll look it up on Wikipedia” or “I Googledit.”
  • Proliferation of user-generated content –blogging, podcasting

Web-based services available and used by millions on mobile phones

• Walled Gardens
• Specific services targeted towards mobile users (or a particular handset)
• Presentation and application conventions that have grown up around “The Web”don’t work on Mobile

Some Figures on Mobile Connectivity

• Mobile phones in service ~ 1300 million
• eMailboxes ~ 1000 million
• PCs installed ~ 700 million
• Internet Users ~ 600 million
• Mobile Internet Users ~ 180 million
• Broadband Households ~ 80 million

Vodafone’s Global Reach

Reach 150 million proportionate mobile customers across its markets

GSM Operators’Commitment to Open Standards

• GSM Standard created in Europe (1982-1990) by ETSI group
• Has become the backbone of mobile telecommunications in Europe
• “Son of GSM” 3G standard take this further
  • Universal Mobile Telephone System (UMTS)
  • Managed by 3rdGeneration Partnership Project (3GPP)
• More than 1 billion customers on GSM
• Advantages:
  • Interoperable hardware and systems, more consistent user experience
  • Rapid market growth, ubiquity of service

Vodafone Live!

• Mobile Portal
• Leverages W3C Technologies
  • XHTML, CSS
  • SVG
  • RDF
  • SOAP
• Walled Garden
• Access to content and services
• Today in 15 markets
• Over 6m customers

Challenges of the Mobile Web

• Despite high market penetration of Internet-capable mobile phones, usage of mobile Internet services is not as wide-spread as from fixed terminals
  • Extra costs involved in developing services that work on mobile
  • Services developed for Web cannot simply be transplanted to Mobile
  • Multiplicity of devices, form factors, browsers, capabilities
  • Constrained bandwidth, high latency
  • Limited attention of the user, one-handed operation
  • Mobile users’ needs are different
• Mobile Web Initiative established in May 2005 to address these issues
  • Vodafone has been instrumental in planning the initiative and, along with France Telecom and HP, is a founder premium sponsor
  • Goal: dramatically increase the breadth and quality of Web experience available on the mobile handset
  • Establish best practices for developing mobile content; make it easier to adapt content to different device capabilities

What does the future of the Web look like?

• “The Web” becomes even more ubiquitous and pervasive
  • “Appliance like” services that “just work”
  • Sophisticated services are easier to develop
  • Democratizing factors
• Increasing amount of sophisticated services available on Mobile browsers
• Web-capable phones and other mobile devices eclipse “fixed”Web platforms
• MWI, Compound Documents, Web Applications groups
  • Work to create better user experiences across the Web
• Multimodal
  • Attack the usability issues of mobile platforms
• Semantic Web
  • Content and applications become increasingly described semantically
  • Enables sophisticated content discovery
  • Enables a new class of application that discover and accesses applications and information on your behalf
• Enablers (such as identity, payment and content adaptation) exposed by service providers as Web Services

XML Compound Documents

• Two phones, two sizes, two browsers, two renderings, the same markup

• SVG, XHTML, CSS

Thank you!

The Challenge of Internationalization

Richard Ishida, Internationalization Activity Lead, W3C

Presentation at: http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/0603-ri-w3c10/

GRIDs and the World Wide Web

Keith Jeffery, President, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM)

Agenda

• ERCIM
• GRIDs
• Way Forward

ERCIM: Members

ERCIM is a consortium of leading research institutions from 18 European countries committed to information technology and applied mathematics.

ERCIM: Members

• ***Founding Member
• **Member of ERCIM EEIG

ERCIM: New Structure

Agenda

• ERCIM
• GRIDs
• Way Forward

Meantime...

• US GRID: Metacomputing
• No information management
• No user interface aspects
• Poor trust and security

• → so obvious to bring GRID and WWW together
• → computation + information

The GRIDs Architecture

The GRIDs Architecture (2)

The Big Idea: What it Provides

A Possible Architecture

A Brief History of GRIDs

1G: custom-made architecture machines to user Pioneering metacomputing
2G: proprietary standards and interfaces I-WAY → GLOBUS, UNICORE, CONDOR LEGION → AVAKI
3G: adopted W3C concepts for open interfaces - OGSA / OGSI: note especially OGSA/DAI: But built on 2.G foundations

But ...

• This comes nowhere near the requirements as originally defined for GRIDs
• Too low-level (programmer not end-user level)
  • Insufficient representativity
  • Insufficient expressivity
  • Insufficient resilience
  • Insufficient dynamic flexibility
• → EC Next Generation GRIDs Expert Group

Agenda

• ERCIM
• GRIDs
• Way Forward

Next Generation GRIDs

• End user interacts with system intelligently to determine user requirement
• System proposes a 'deal' by obtaining resources for computation, information, detectors, communications, user interface technology with any constraints (rights, security) and charges
• System is self*
• System has trust and security
• System delivers results in right form at right place at right time
• System provides explanation with results and allows interactive intelligent dialogue

And This System Is ...

• GRIDs concept - overall architecture
  • Metadata, agents, brokers, P2P, resource scheduling
• WWW
  • Semantic Web
    • Ontologies, intelligent user interface
    • Interoperation
  • Web of Trust
    • Bona fides, offers, contracts
    • Electronic IDs, single sign-on
    • Identification, authentication, authorisation
  • Web Services
    • Identification
    • Location
    • Composition

Where Now?

• WWW has its own purpose and development
  • Information management
  • Semantics, trust, user interface (WAI)
• GRID has its own purpose and development
  • metacomputing
• Next Generation GRIDs provides a great fusion of capability
  • All the above: 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts'
  • But not possible without WWW developments managed through W3C

Next Session

Tim Berners-Lee Keynote

All W3C10 Europe Sessions