The Intelligent Wireless Web

This book presents a fascinating view of what lies ahead for the Web, with an overview of the technologies that will make it possible. It focuses on five emerging technologies which will combine to produce what the authors call 'the intelligent wireless Web'.

These technologies are speech recognition as the user interface - instead of using keyboard and mouse. Wireless devices instead of cables. Integrated networks instead of stand-alone devices. The new Mobile Internet Protocol - instead of the old Internet Protocol. And the introduction of new dynamic Web applications. They do a very good job of explaining each of these issues, whilst keeping the larger picture in view.


Each of the major topics they identify is dealt with in its own chapter. Sometimes they re-summarise in mid explanation - which makes it easier to understand the technicalities. First they outline the latest developments in speech recognition. The verdict seems to be 'We're almost there'. Then they cover personal area networks - which means 'all the digital gadgets that surround us in daily life'.

The general argument here is that the mobile phone, personal organiser, and desktop will all eventually merge into one. It's already happening in Japan, where household space is at a premium.

This section also includes a detailed account of the software such as Bluetooth and Jini which is ready to deal with this level of interconnectivity. They then cover the issue of merging wired and wireless networks - including the technical issues of bandwidth and wavelength.

There's a chapter which explains the latest state of play in third generation mobile phone technology and the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) in particular. They also have a very interesting section on Speech Synthetic Markup Language (SSML, a sub-set of XML) which enables web pages to be read out loud by text-to-speech generators.

The same is true of their account of what's known as 'adaptive software'. These are programs which are self-organising. They have the ability to learn and adapt to changing conditions in a network - such as levels of congestion and errors.

They explain the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standards, which are really important for anybody who wants to keep abreast of current developments. Then they describe the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). All of these developments are leading towards what Tim Berners-Lee calls 'the semantic Web' - and he should know, because he invented it.