Going Beyond Web Browsing to Web Tasking: Transforming Web Users from Web Operators to Web Supervisors

The web was originated as a global information space. Over time, it has been evolved into a global service platform upon which users perform transactional tasks. While web browsing is good for information retrieval and search, web browsing might not be the most optimal user model for web tasks. Tasks have defined sequences of sub-tasks advancing towards specific goals that require user input. Web tasks involve operations on resources that produce side effects. Web browsing typically involves read-only operations on resources. This paper introduces the concept of web tasking, applying the RESTful web application model of "Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State" (HATEOAS) on web tasks. It also introduces the notion of web task automations; pre-set conditions for executions at future points in time. It also discusses machine-operate goal-directed application state transitions as a part of task automation. The ubiquitous nature of interactions and monitoring of web tasking is also covered.

[1]  R. Wood.  Task complexity: Definition of the construct , 1986 .

[2]  Joanna W. Ng,et al.  The Personal Web: smart internet for me , 2010, CASCON.

[3]  Cesare Pautasso,et al.  RESTful Web service composition with BPEL for REST , 2009, Data Knowl. Eng..

[4]  Daniel S. Weld,et al.  Intelligent Agents on the Internet: Fact, Fiction, and Forecast , 1995, IEEE Expert.

[5]  James Snell,et al.  Introduction to Web services architecture , 2002, IBM Syst. J..

[6]  John C. Tang,et al.  Mobile taskflow in context: a screenshot study of smartphone usage , 2010, CHI.

[7]  Erik Wilde,et al.  Hypermedia-Driven RESTful Service Composition , 2010, ICSOC Workshops.

[8]  Thomas Kirste,et al.  Smart Environments and Self-Organizing Appliance Ensembles , 2005, Mobile Computing and Ambient Intelligence.

[9]  Andrei Broder,et al.  A taxonomy of web search , 2002, SIGF.

[10]  Roy T. Fielding,et al.  Principled design of the modern Web architecture , 2000, Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2000 the New Millennium.

[11]  Rik Van de Walle,et al.  The rise of the web for agents , 2013 .

[12]  Cesare Pautasso,et al.  Composing RESTful Services with JOpera , 2009, SC@TOOLS.

[13]  Mark Chignell,et al.  The Smart Internet - Current Research and Future Applications , 2010, The Smart Internet.

[14]  Mark Weiser.  The computer for the 21st century , 1991 .