Applications for Intermediaries on the Web
                       Paul P. Maglio
                 IBM Almaden Research Center

Intermediaries provide a new approach to programming web
applications that increases the web's computational power, the
web's flexibility, and web programmer productivity. Whereas web
servers have traditionally been responsible for producing all
content, intermediaries now provide new places for producing and
manipulating web data. Intermediaries are computational elements
that lie along the path of a web transaction. In this talk, I
will describe the fundamental ideas behind intermediaries and
provide a collection of example applications. I will also
describe WBI, an implemented architecture for building
intermediaries that has been used to construct many
applications, including personal histories, password management,
image distillation, collaborative filtering, targeted
advertising, and web advising.