Abstract
The goal of the second symposium on Personal Web was to provide a report on further work accomplished aiming towards establishing a new milestone in the evolution of the web. This is a radical change from a fixed, manual, drive-by-click web to a malleable, context-aware personal assistant web. This second symposium follows the previous symposium about personal web that was hosted by CASCON 2010.
The symposium began with a review of Personal Web vision, discussions about the architecture of the Personal Web as well as the way in which Personal Web will change human-computer interaction. Past attempts at making the Web more user-centered, including mashups and scripting, were also noted. The scope for innovative interaction paradigms was also discussed, along with the potential impact that Personal Web may have on the discipline of human-computer interaction.
Participants in this second symposium continued to explore the nature of Personal Web as an extension of the current web that promotes web users from their current state of "web workers" into "web supervisors". This means a much reduced cognitive and working memory load while using the web to accomplish goals.
Papers presented for the symposium discussed the types of smarter interaction and smarter services (Chignell et al, 2010) that are required to enable Personal Web. Other enabling functions mentioned included associated semantic tools that will allow users of Personal Web to operate in units of intentions, as well as progressing by tasks instead of operating in terms of URLs and logon forms. Also reviewed was the role of predictive analytics for supportive decision making within the context of Personal Web. The presentations examined the role of semantics in Personal Web from a variety of perspectives.
Participants at this symposium discussed how to extend the web to function as a transparent, integrated, instrumented, intelligent and social system in order to assist individual web users with tasks and attend to matters of concern. As part of this discussion some of the presentations considered the supporting technologies required to implicitly discover, gather, aggregate, deliver and recommend data, resources and services from across the web. These integrated web elements are able to support the user's own situation and needs. Another key area discussed was the relationship of Personal Web to social media and the users' social milieu, such as sharing discoveries, interactions and states automatically with other members of their social circle.
This symposium covered requirements and methodologies for a personalized web that also provides cognitive support for web users in a way that is intuitive, contextual and socially aware. Technology advances were discussed and not only included enhancing the user's experience with particular web server domains at the micro level, but also the melding of resources across multiple web server domains at the macro level.
The symposium concluded with a discussion about specific applications of Personal Web, in the domains of healthcare, e-Commerce, and business in general.
