The idea of making all of the contents of all the information stored on the World Wide Web widely accessible is a general goal of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its founder/director Tim Berners-Lee; often expressed as "everyone, everything connected".
The Accessible Planet Project will allow a person to access whatever of the information stored on the Web it is desired to access. As that information expands, its accessibility will, without further update/intervention, also simultaneously expand. You can not only know what is happening, you can find out how the events are viewed by those you trust to opine about them.
The current buzzphrase used to describe the underlying technology to accomplish this is "The Semantic Web".
The aim of The Accessible Planet Project is to demonstrate the benefits of this notion without flaunting the philosophy/technology behind it.
We intend to show that the workings of the Semantic Web and its notion of Ambient Information can be tried by anyone with almost no special training.
The first phase of the project, designed to show the requirements for a planet-wide implementation will take place RSN (Real Soon Now) under the auspices of the Smith-Kettlewell Institute.
In Yerba Buena Gardens in downtown San Francisco, near the birthplace of the United Nations.
The Talking Signs installed in the Gardens have digital serial numbers that distinctively identify each sign to an appropriately equipped receiver, which in turn is coupled to the World Wide Web where all the pertinent information is stored/indexed.
The initial demonstration will involve Mitsubishi Precision Corporation of Japan, Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center of Smith-Kettlewell Institute, Dan Brickley of the W3C, Libby Miller of UK's University of Bristol Information for Learning and Research Technology, James Marston of the geography department of University of California at Santa Barbara and the author.
Yerba Buena Gardens has been equipped with over 60 Talking Signs transmitters with embedded digital serial numbers. Each of these will be treated as a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) with a presence on the Web. Its geographic location will enable anyone with a suitable receiver to know whatever details about it and its surroundings are stored thereon. By locating two signs and the angle between them, one knows one's own location very precisely and orientation information can be determined for all the purposes associated with moving about.
Once one's location is established it is a fairly simple matter to be presented with any sort of information that is chosen, e.g. "how do I get to the bus stop to get a bus to a certain address", "where can I eat near here", "are any of my colleagues at the conference in the Moscone Center beneath the Gardens", "who's giving a concert tonight in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium", or "call me a taxi" ["you're a taxi"]!
The components that have been developed by the W3C which make all this possible are: CC/PP with its facility for tailoring one's system to provide preferences/profiles/privileges with which to filter the overwhelming wealth of information available (and P3P to allay users' concerns about privacy); RDF, a means of indexing all that information so that the device can choose what/how to present itself; The Voice Browser to present all this to the blind/print-impaired user; a "layered map" using Scalable Vector Graphics with speech-enabled presentation.
