"Appliance" digital devices such as handheld cameras, scanners, and microphones generate data that people want to put on Web pages. Unfortunately, numerous complex steps are required. Contrast this with Web output: handheld web browsers enjoy increasing infrastructral support. We hypothesize that the utility of input appliances will be greatly increased if they too were "infrastructure enabled". Appliance Data Services attempts to systematically describe the task domain of providing seamless and graceful interoperability between input appliances and the Web. We offer an application architecture and a validating prototype that we hope will "open up the playing field" and motivate further work. Our initial efforts have identified three design challenges: device heterogeneity, user interface, and harnessing infrastructure services. Our architecture isolates device and protocol heterogeneity considerations into a single extensible architectural component, allowing most of the application logic to deal exclusively with Web-friendly protocols and formats. To distribute the user interface between the network infrastructure and user devices, we tag input with commands specifying how the data is to be manipulated once injected into the infrastructure. Additional conceptual contributions include canonicalization and late binding of these commands to applications, two mechanisms that improve the user experience by allowing "natural" extensions of the device's UI to be used for application selection and minimize the amount of configuration required before end-users benefit from Appliance Data Services. Finally, we describe how services can be applied to process data, using simple HTTP connected conversion services as examples; we could also leverage services connected via Jini or CORBA. We also describe an implemented prototype of parts of the architecture and a specific application. 12 Pages
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