User:JohnPritchard/Web operating system 4

The term Web operating system has been used to describe a network application system for integrating web applications into a web based work space. These systems may be better described using the terms Web desktop or Webtop.

The term also has been used in the academic literature of Computer science in the field of metacomputing to describe network services for internet scale distributed computing, as in the WebOS project at UC Berkeley, and the WOS project. In both cases the scale of the web operating system extends across the internet, like the web.

Common to all uses, a Web operating system is distinct from Internet Operating Systems in that it is independent of the Operating system as the software abstraction layer over computer hardware.

WebOS Project
An article describing the WebOS project is available separately, however its comparison to the WOS project in its conception of a web operating system can be described as a finite or catalogued collection of services.

WOS Project
In the context of the WOS project, the web operating system is conceived of as a dynamic or ever changing collection of services.

"The WOS (Web Operating System) is a joint project of four universities that aims at developing an operating system for the Web on top of existing operating systems and making the native services internet wide available. The rapid development and heterogeneous nature of the Web has as a result the impossibility to develop a complete catalog of all the resources and services available. The key to the successful implementation of the WOS is the ability for multiple different versions of the WOS to interact in a meaningful manner. Therefore a distributed software configuration management technique has to be found to provide this kind of interaction. Because of the changing nature of the Web, software components must be found on other criteria than just URI (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Automatic software configuration will optimize the selection of resources for a user request depending on interfaces, user preferences, cost and other parameters."

- Simon Schubiger and Béat Hirsbrunner