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.