Requirements for personalized user environments in telecommunications

"The network is the computer" is a vision currently coming true. That "computer", however is characterized by a complexity, chaos, and abundance of information which makes it increasingly difficult for a single (let alone nonexpert) user to efficiently utilize it. We propose an architecture that allows users to have their own personal view of the network, and therefore make "the network their personal computer". In our architecture users can describe their personal working environment (PWE) which will be instantiated on the terminal they are using regardless of the type of terminal equipment or their specific location within the network. This demands that resources in the respective vicinity of the user be considered for inclusion in his/her personal working environment and that the terminal be flexible enough to present different incantations of the same resources in a consistent manner to the user. We describe the components needed for such an architecture and report on a prototype implementation.