WBI: Intermediaries for Manipulating Web Content

Robert C. Barrett, IBM Almaden Research Center
barrett@almaden.ibm.com

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University January 16, 1998

 

The current architecture of the web gives the server sole responsibility for determining the content that results from a browser's request. Because of the well-defined information stream between browser and server, this architecture is easily extended to allow multiple entities to cooperate in producing the final delivered content. Applications can then be built as intermediary components which live along the information stream. WBI defines intermediaries which can observe, produce, and edit web content anywhere between browser and server. WBI provides a place for applications to manipulate web content. These applications can be used for personalization, protocol extensions, collaboration, advising, and dynamic content generation. The same concepts can be applied to non-web information streams, such as mouse/keyboard input, information push, and e-mail.

 

Dr. Barrett is a Research Staff Member of the User Ergonomics Research department in the Computer Science function at the Almaden Research Center.

He received B.S. degrees in physics and electrical engineering and a M.S.degree in physics from Washington University (St. Louis) in 1987, and M.S.and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics from Stanford University in 1989 and 1991, respectively.  He subsequently joined IBM at the Almaden Research Center, where he has worked on magnetic storage, scanned probe storage, computer pointing devices, information retrieval technologies, and web-based intermediaries.

 

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