The World-Wide Web consists not only of informational, but also computational resources. However, these resources, especially computational ones are underutilized. With the rapid development of new forms and concepts of networked and mobile computing, it is increasingly clear that also operating systems must evolve so that all machines in a given network can appear to be controlled by the same operating system. As a result, the world-wide interconnected networks, commonly called the Internet or the Web, should potentially be supported and managed by a huge virtual operating system.

Besides other approaches the Web Operating System or WOS is one approach to improve the management of the highly heterogeneous and dynamical resource space of the web. The talk will give an overview about the work and the results of the WOS Project Group dealing with the described problems since 1997.