Browsing in the Physical Web

Dmitry Namiot, Manfred Sneps-Sneppe "On Physical Web Browser"

In this paper, we present the Physical Web Browser project for web applications depending on the environment. At this moment, many of users all over the world visit websites using their mobile devices only. Any mobile device (e.g., smartphone) has sensors to capture the environmental information. This information (context) could be analyzed and used within the web applications. There are, at least, two models for using this information. Firstly, we can use context information for data gathering requests in a web application. In this case, the output depends on the context. It is the classical model for context-aware data retrieval. In the second model, we can use context-aware data for improving user experience (for changing and tuning user interfaces). In other words, we present a way for the adaptation of web applications depending on the environment.