Ubiquitous Browsing of the World

The imminent mass deployment of pervasivecomputing technologies such as sensor networks andRFID tags, together with the increasing participationof the Web community in feeding geo-locatedinformation within tools such as Google Earth, willsoon make available an incredible amount ofinformation about the physical and social worlds andtheir processes. This opens up the possibility ofexploiting all such information for the provisioning ofpervasive context-aware services for “browsing theworld”, i.e., for facilitating users in gatheringinformation about the world, interacting with it, andunderstanding it. However, for this to occur, propermodels and infrastructures must be developed. In thischapter we propose a simple model for therepresentation of contextual information, the designand implementation of a general infrastructure forbrowsing the world, as well as some exemplarservices we have implemented over it.