A scenario:
Imagine Maria driving a wheel-chair to a shopping centre. She needs 
to get money and then can do her shopping.

First she needs to find an ATM she can use. Attached to her wheel 
chair is the device she uses for accessing such things as ATMs, the 
washing machine etc. Generally, her chair device, known as the 
universal remote console (URC), is not online in the sense of being 
connected to the Internet but it does make wireless connections to 
local devices. The URC is now within wireless reach of an ATM that 
might be suitable. Maria uses the discovery metadata from the ATM to 
determine if it will be suitable for her. This information is 
provided by the ATM, upon request from her URC, and can be of several 
forms, minimal or rich, depending upon what the ATM has to offer. In 
fact, the ATM has only basic information - what it can do in terms of 
interface features and its location and physical features. This is 
enough for Maria to determine that she can use her URC to interact 
with the ATM and get money for her groceries.

Maria's URC uses a secure connection to 'talk' to the ATM, telling it 
that she needs extra time for entering her PIN and similar details, 
and asking for the cash she wants. As Maria has difficulty 
remembering how much money she should take out on any particular 
occasion, she relies on the special 'skin' that the ATM offers to 
users of smart URCs. This 'skin' helps Maria focus on ATM 
functionality that helps her choose how much money to take out etc. 
(She has seen her friend Rose using the same ATM with a different 
skin that helps her by using her voice input technology.)

Maria has to do some grocery shopping but first she wants to treat 
herself to a new microwave oven. She enters the 'white goods' shop 
and is able to see how well the various makes of microwave ovens 
respond to her URC. Some immediately provide her with custom skins 
that show their features and how to use them; others just have 
generic skins, and she gets basic information but it is not set out 
in any specially friendly way, and some make no response to the URC. 
Maria chooses the one she likes the best in terms of how it 
communicates with her via the URC and how it will look in her 
kitchen. Paying for the new oven is so easy, she wonders how she did 
it in the past - today she just locates the shop's credit payment 
system, types in the amount, and presses the 'pay' button - done! 
It's so good to not have to struggle with writing her signature. And 
it is very satisfying to give the delivery instructions to the shop 
as part of the payment process, instead of having to write out those 
boring details.

Pleased with her purchase, Maria goes off to the supermarket.

So how does this system work?
The targets, or products, know about themselves and have one or more 
ways of presenting this information:
* (badly) on a paper label or brochure which suggests they are the 
best products;
* electronically, using generic skins which provide information about 
all the features normally associated with such a product (depending, 
of course, on what kind of product it is), or
* with special skins that are designed to provide extra information 
and to be user friendly for different communities of users.

It is, of course, metadata that is made available for the shaping of the skins.

Currently we are considering the idea of using extended DC metadata 
to capture essential information - esp. to make a standard that is 
required of all products sold in the US. Such products include TVs 
etc but also could include websites .... The extension to DC being 
considered is a DC-accessibility element that would contain some 
special accessibility information.

We are also considering the user profile for the metadata about the 
user's needs. And we have a model that has three entities: the target 
device or service, the user and their URC, and dictionaries that are 
used for interpretation of the metadata. These dictionaries will 
probably take the form of metadata registries.

The skins can come from the manufacturers or they can come from third parties.