Week 14

Week 13

Coming Soon

Week 11 & Week 12

More Research ;


So far I have part of the middle -

Meta Data

Part of the Beginning -

History of the WWW

Time to try and connect the dots...

Middleware is a big part of the progression of online software. The Internet is now the arena for distributed application interaction.

There are many implementations of software that aim to bridge the distributed divide to allow interoperability and communication between software developed for operation in differing environments.

Middleware is said to replace the distributed or networking functions that applications do not provide.


The key to this part of the lit review is to tie the middleware to the past -

what once was

To show the need for this

middleware

and to connect it to the current technologies

what now is

So far the resources are


Research Advances in Middleware for Distributed
Systems: State of the Art
Richard E. Schantz
Douglas C. Schmidt
Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept.
University of California, Irvine
http://www.ifip.tu-graz.ac.at/TC6/events/WCC/WCC2002/papers/Schmidt.pdf

Middleware: Past and Present a Comparison
Hennadiy Pinus
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~dgorin1/451/middleware/middleware.pdf

Reflective Middleware and Security:
OOPP meets Obol
Anders Andersen, Gordon Blair†, Tage Stabell-Kulø,
Per Harald Myrvang and Tom-Anders Nilsen Røst
http://www.pasta.cs.uit.no/pubs/andersen2003b.pdf

COMPONENTS, MIDDLEWARE AND WEB SERVICES
Dimka Karastoyanova
http://www.dvs.tu-darmstadt.de/publications/pdf/IADIS-ICWI-2003.pdf

Middleware for Distributed Systems
Evolving the Common Structure for Network-centric Applications
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/PDF/middleware-chapter.pdf

Recommendation of Multimedia Objects Using Metadata and Link Analysis
https://oa.doria.fi/handle/10024/33670

Data Extraction:Wrapper Learning
http://www.isi.edu/integration/Phoebus/

Search Middleware and the Simple Digital Library
Interoperability Protocol
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/rsriram/pubs/dlib-march2000.pdf


Using Message-Oriented Middleware for Reliable Web Services Messaging
Book Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Publisher Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
ISSN 0302-9743 (Print) 1611-3349 (Online)
Volume Volume 3095/2004
Book Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web
DOI 10.1007/b98797
Copyright 2004
ISBN 978-3-540-22396-2
Pages 89-104
Subject Collection Computer Science
SpringerLink Date Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Middleware Reliability Implementations and Connector Wrappers
IET Digital Library
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~stire/Papers/wads04.pdf
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=IEESEM002004000919000047000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

Software Engineering and Middleware: A Roadmap
. In Proceedings of the Conference on the Future of Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, Jun. 2000
http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/787/1/7.6_middleware.pdf
.

Week 10

History of the WWW -

- Idea for the opening of the Lit Review -

The concepts being considered are web based / oriented (Web Services)... their origins lie in the progression of web technologies and The Internet; so it is my thinking that we should talk about the web and the context of its evolution to show where the need arose for this technology and how it is applicable in the real world.

The best place to start - W3C .. home of the web standards and protocols;

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/Specs.html

The RFCs were helpful ... but very detailed ... I am familiar with some of them from previous networking research.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt // I had a look through these
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2109/rfc2109


The site also had some external links like;

MIT - Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
http://www.csail.mit.edu/ // a lot of this did not pertain to my area of study - it was interesting though
Computing Research Association
http://www.cra.org/ // again not a lot of helpful research - it was also interesting


This was more helpful - Finally some research i could use
A Little History of the World Wide Web
http://www.w3.org/History.html

which had links too;

A presentation from the W3C 10th Anniversary - history on the web and some important ppls.
http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/w3c10-HowItAllStarted/History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History
Gregory R. Gromov
http://netvalley.com/intval1.html
Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/
The last item was not so much good in terms of history but I know it would be useful later on so I kept it.


We got to know some interesting people ;

Chris Lilley

Dan Connolly

Dr. J.C.R. Licklider (always wanted to say i knew this guy)

Leonard Kleinrock

Norman Walsh

Paul Cotton

Robert W. Taylor

Roy Fielding

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Bray

Vinton Cerf

Also this link was sourced from History of Internet and WWW -

How the Internet Came to Be

Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba

http://netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.txt

Week 9

More Data about Meta Data

So we've got the ball rolling ... It's Meta Data all the way.

Let's be "all official" and start off with the W3C - World Wide Web Consortium ... (since they are the officials that set the standards)

What started here:

http://www.w3.org/Metadata/

Is the definition of how powerful Meta Data really can be. (I knew it was good for some thing great) -

Deep Breadth - In small Pieces; Here we go -

Now the site above defines Metadata / Meta Data as:

... is machine understandable information for the web

This definition is in the context of the web ... The "web" is a large repository of resources. That is a very formal way of looking at things. As a student not only of an academic institution but also of the web ... I dare say not from the origin but from the days when yahoo, excite, alta vista and then lycos were everyday tools.

The web has grown exponentially; so much so is this hodge podge of information on all things imaginable that locating / searching and creditability have become issues (not to mention accessibility and standardization). The W3C's initiative at sloving what seems to be the problem (we'll talk about this later on in week 11 or 12) is hitting at the source and hitting hard. If you go through the documentation;

http://www.w3.org/Metadata
http://www.w3.org/Metadata/Activity.html

Will give you the definition of Meta Data as above and it will take you here;

http://www.w3.org/RDF/

This Link goes to the W3C's - Resource Description Framework -

They describe the framework adequately as a specification to support the exchange of data online.
This is very simmered down.

Now this document requires some prep reading

http://www.noisebetweenstations.com/personal/essays/metadata_glossary/metadata_glossary.html

This site gives some nice broad definitions of;

• Meta Data
• Ontology
• Semantic Web
• Data Model
• Resource Description Framework
• Topic maps
  
• XML

Now this may seem like a big run around; and trust me it is. Going through the W3C official documentation on RDF and the RDF graphs and its specifications is moving from one hyperlink to another sometimes in the same document and you don't even realize it. That is daunting.

So I will put all the above in a some context. The goal of the RDF - Resource Description Framework with respect to Meta Data has now evolved into the Semantic Web( http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/).

The specification links to some outside documents that explain the situation well with examples from the systems in the physical world that we can relate to. (Libraries, Video Stores)
(great link)
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/06/rdf.html
extended here
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html

What they are all really getting to is that in the systems we have developed for use by humans and machines so far that deal with data have all been modeled around meta data. The data we use has some generic meanings or fall into categories with which they in turn have meaning or at least reference to each other.

The web is a huge set of data, it's growing everyday, however unlike any of the other systems that we catalog so well the web is mostly non descriptive. It is content with out relationship because it lacks coherent semantics.

Whole purpose of the RDF and the Semantic Web initiative by the W3C is to change this. In the future it is imperative that the web of data mean something. To keep track of the information being generated and the online space being constantly filled we need to catalog and categorize information so that we can make resources relative to eachother.

The RDF is the how... its how they inted to devise what the descriptions (meta data) will look like. This standard abstraction will help interoperability. This is the hope. So if we all describe things using some vocabulary subsets in the same format (using the RDF) then we get a standard that we can apply to each other's data.


According to the articles [Tim Bray] right now we relate resources and located them "the hard way".

A bit from my head
Search engines do what is known as screen scraping; that is they manually and literally go throught the content of resources (the human value/representation) and match the contents to criteria or the contents of other resources to find reference or similarity. This is achieved using complex algorithms and large amounts of resources(hardware and software ... not to mention human to design the algorithms in the first place).

So this was a very disorganized diary. It gets better I hope. Right now its just alot of information swirling around in my head. The important things are;

1. I'm not bored (Yet - hope I've not bored you)
2. I'm not confused (Yet - really hope I've not confused you either)
3. I'm still having fun. (hope you are too)
   

AND I'm Learning STUFF.

I think I'll do another degree after this one. So I can do another project. I've not had this much fun since I was 9 and played marbles in primary school.

Week 8

Research -

Scouring the library, Web, Athens and every magazine i can put my hands on to get scaffolding for all my ideas.

My Ideas ....

The Big Idea

~ Meta-data ~

The Inspiration;

Breaking Network Logjams by Michelle Effors, Ralf Keotter and Muriel Médard.
Scientific America June 2007

The article talks about the approach used to transmit data in current systems and how these approaches are now a deterring factor to evolving network transportation systems to meet increasing bandwidth and client demands.

Network coding is promoted as a means of addressing the current problem of bottlenecks in routed networks. The TCP / IP network infrastructure is based on switching. The fundamentals were outlined by mathematician Claude E. Shannon; communication channels that have a capacity at a given time and as long as that capacity is not exceeded a reliable transportation mechanism exists.

The system is described to be analogous to roads and the data being transmitted like cars (each bit is a car) travelling over the channels. The authors talk about the POTS - Plain Old Telephone System; where more than one converstation connection could not exist on the same channel at the same time.

The communication technology grew out of the context of two way converstations propagated over the lan line telephone environment. The Internet and communications infrastructure that is currently available fosters multiple messages over multiple channels at the same time. This is quite a different scenario. The idea of dedicating a channel to transmitting one message / packet at a time is the limiting factor.

These researchers pose the idea that instead of treating packets like traffic in terms of cars; that additional logic can be used to increase the throughput of the network without increasing the physical provisions for bandwidth. The idea is based on a device called a "coder" and nodes that know the logic that the coders use to pass data.

The article does a great job of breaking down what would be complex math algorithms into simple examples that are easy to follow. The thing that stood out in the article was the idea that the coders would pass not the messages that were intended to reach the recipient but "evidence about the messages".

This idea of messages about messages or Data about Data .... Data describing Data is a momentous concept (at least I think so) that could change the way we use technology and the way the world works (now that is getting a little ahead of thing - but one can dream).




What it means -

I would like to foundation the software that I am building for my final project around this idea; Meta Data.

Meta Data / Metadata - Data describing a resource not the payload message or content of the resource.

Metadata is more important to computers that to humans. The way I see it ... its what they use to communicate. To a computer a web page is nothing more than a file. However with a description or with some value that a processing agent can use to compare a resource to another resource therin lies some leverage or power.

Even though the article is about transportation and global network communications its based on this thing called Meta Data ... I will delve deeper and try to find other articles or implementations of Meta Data ... and if I find some common ground devise a way to integrate it into the project.

I have some vague thoughts; I know various apps and systems use meta data to communicate and co ordinate thing utilizing DTDs and Schemas. The next step is to find out how.

Week 7

What I Did

Research - I did some light reading on my topic area. So far all my research has been through general Internet resources available to the public. I know the university offers access to an online library that has links to many other electronic libraries and university resources however I have yet to venture into that ever consuming void of available information.

So this week one of my endeavors will be to set up my Athens account and find some academic resources that will support my ideas for my middleware component.

I pondered ways to organize my research but so far I have only come up with a table structure that is in my view minimal and not sufficient. I think it will take of time to constantly record all the links and books that I use and at the end I will have a record but it will be in random order and still require a lot of work to become a list of a standard bibliography necessary for the project proposal.


According to the Lecture

At the moment we should have the following ;

• A clear understanding of the project idea
• Finished the project proposal
• Have people resources and interviews if necessary
• Risk Assessment
  
• Mini Literature Review
  

Now I have most of the above. I understand my project and the topic area better than when I first came up with the title and I feel more comfortable with the technologies I may be working with. None of them are set in stone... I still have time to review varying options and make an evaluation. (Different languages and platforms).

However I have a problem;

I think i am now understanding the depth and necessity of the Mini Literature Review and the part it plays in the next submission (Literature Review).
Mine was poorly organized and my research served only to enlighten me on the topic area and the project in general. I now have to embark on the very same trip completed and collect references and supporting documentation for the Literature Review.

I fear that will not be able to find some of the reading that I would have like to include as part of the literature review.


What I Plan to Do

I definitely have to think deeply and come up with a suitable and relevant way of documenting resources.

Lessons Learned

The literature review aims to -
Show the examiner that the student has read extensively on the topic area and have gathered awareness on the state of research for that particular topic area.

Critical Evaluation -
Critical evaluation is the foundation of the literature review. The paper is assessed based on how well the student is able to read and interpret different points of view from different authors.

Your Own Ideas -
The examiners are looking for new ideas. What the student thinks that is not published. This is a touchy situation. A student may think that their idea is new only because they have not done enough research or their research was not targeted properly to return corresponding results.
This is cause for concern - wording should be done carefully and tactfully to avoid giving false information.

Week 6

What's Left to Do

The thing i am most concerned about is the references. I am not sure i can find all the things i have read so far. To get an idea of the technological environment surrounded my topic area i just randomly searched the keywords i compiled.


So withstanding the loss of some documentation... I have an article that is very promising. I will only mention it here since I need only have the reference and i will revisit it in detail and enthusiasm after the proposal is safely in the hands of the SBCS Greenwich Dept.

Inspiration - "Breaking Network Logjams" by Effros Keotter and Medard.

Why I Did It

Since I was so daft as to read without keeping track of what or how i was going about gathering information; I resorted to looking thorough the historys on three computers that i used to do my searches.

This was a pain staking process which resulted in the following;

google: Struts2 generates soap

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/oreilly/windows/news/soapreview_0600.html

IBM Soap vs Microsoft Soft



how companies use web services

6. http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3011%2F32p11%2F32p11.asp
7. http://www.strikeiron.com/ProductDetail.aspx?p=388
9. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480496.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms951268.aspx



http://www.amazon.com/Success-Stories-AWS-home-page/b?ie=UTF8&node=182241011&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA



TECH RESOURCES

Online Learning
http://www.firstpartners.net/blog/category/technology/junit/


google
creating a dtd for a database
4
http://doesen8.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/webdb/wien/015.pdf

5
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/09/dtdtodbs.html

7
http://db.apache.org/ddlutils/schema/database.dtd.html

http://db.apache.org/ojb/
http://db.apache.org/ddlutils/ant/
http://db.apache.org/ddlutils/api-usage.html


scholar.google
where can a DTD be used - page 2 results
18
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~alfw/publications/experience_wang99.pdf


Lessons Learned

Last minute is bad.
Organization is good.

The is a hoard of technology surrounding this topic area. I am going to have to take my time and sift though what I want to use and what I should use verses what is nice to use. I feel rather overwhelmed after all this reading. A little more enlightened about REST and SOAP and some implementations; but all the same I dont feel as enlightened as I should be. More reading is in order but I think I need to rest first. (Little Joke).

So until next week. The proposal is printed in duplicate and handed in.

The Journey Continues.

What I Plan to do

• Rest (not REST)
  
• Try and find a way to organize my research
• Do some more research
  
• Find some direction as to the next hand up - which will most likely come with the lecture this Friday (29th Aug)

Week 5

One Week to go before the proposal submission date.

What I Did

The Outline for the task list (WBS) look like ; - Initiating & Planning - Research & Analysis - Design & Test Phase 1 - Design & Test Phase 2 - Design & Test Phase 3 - Final Testing & Documentation The phases are there and again I have the general ideas in my head however organizing them into something resembling methodological steps is going to be a formidable task. I like software. No I love software. And I have an Idea of how building a piece of software should progress(OR rather how I would like it to progress). That is a start, not neglecting that this project entails mass planning and documentation. Documentation is no always my cup of tea but it is necessary here so I must make adequate provisions. I put the first constraint on myself for this project.

The documentation and reporting for this project must be as strong as or better than the design and code that succeed it.

So my thinking for filling in the tasks follows the pattern below;



After outlining the sub phases and coming up with tasks for the WBS I tacked the relavence of other courses. I tried my best to make the short paragraphs represent my individual take on what each subject matter meant to me and at the same time be professional and show how i would use them for the final project.

Honestly each course we did was bordered by thin lines of how technology actually exists in the real world environment. They are very interconnected especially in the scope of this degree and in my case the final project.

Why I Did It

One week left before submission. I am not counting next week. I hope to be finished by this weekend - 23rd through the 24th so that Monday I can work on getting folders for submission and printing.

I want to try my utmost to manage time in this project. Since it has a fixed deadline and I see the outcome as a all or nothing scenario. This is based on the fact that if the submitted software does not model all the requirements outlined in the proposal the system is seen as incomplete and is not successful and is marked as such.

My project must be successful. More than the complexities of the code / frameworks and technology involved I know my biggest challenge other than time management is my shortcomings where documentation is concerned. Like the proposal and the literature review. I don't doubt my ability to produce good work but I know it will take me more than 15 hours a week.


Lessons Learned

I always like the idea of being a couple days ahead. Depending on the assignment / target sometimes a couple weeks if i can manage it. A month makes me most comfortable.

However with this final project I am not daring to assume too much of myself. I think i can manage a few days ahead and that is still left to be seen.

I realized out of the Relevance of other courses that I wrote; how very complete the Greenwich program is made up. I am very proud to belong to such an establishment.

Nothing goes as planned. I still did not gather my references. I know what i read but I cannot necessarily find everything. I need to find a way to organize my reading material; especially the online references which make up the bulk of my resources.

Note: I use many text books but they are easily referenced.

What I Plan to Do

1. Refine WBS (after lecturer's input)
   
2. Compile References
3. Put entire proposal together
4. Look at ways to organize references
   

Week 4

What I Did

Detailed the Project Proposal

• Worked on the details of each objective (these are my objectives);
  
  
  • To research literature on the area of Web Services specifically in relation to CMS for tertiary education institutions.
    
    
  • To investigate a suitable methodology that will identify with the social needs specific to the business environment thereby producing requirements that support the stakeholder interests and vision for the resulting system.
    

  • To examine the tertiary educational facility and determine how a revolutionary model using web services would be established.

  • To develop a sound data schema representing the Meta Data of the primary data stores in a design usable by the web service to determine favourable search results.
    
    
  • To replicate an instance of the existing MIS environ by designing a module that will be used to determine the design specifications
    
    
  • To design the middleware and portal solution
    
    
  • To test a working prototype of the system modules and then integrate them
  
  

• Developed Risks - these were the things on my mind;
  
  
  1. Research on Risks in a software development environment
     
     
     • What kind of risks apply?
     • How much detail does this risk assesment need?
     • How many pages should it be?
     • What information about the risk is relavent?
     
     
  2. Compile some main points
     

• Came up with Critical Success Factors

1. Time Management – each phase to occur in planned time slots.

2. Ability to access published & documented material respective to the study area – Message Oriented Middleware utilizing RESTful Web Services.

3. Support and participation of school officials in approval and continuous support throughout the life of the project.

4. Manage the scope of the project to meet realistic and feasible objectives.

5. Adaptive risk management – the ability to anticipate and plan for changing risk potentials as the project phases succeed each other to the end.

6. Designing a strong DTD Schema for the middleware to base its decisions upon.

7. Guidance from the technical staff involved in the daily procedures of the existing MIS.

8. Rigorous testing to minimize bugs and rework at later phases.

9. Maintenance of the project diary

How I Did It

• A lecturer sent the entire project class a link on risk
  
  I read the document and still had trouble getting my risks on paper. I could think of many things that would go wrong but I was still not clear on if they qualified as an actual 'risk'.
  
  So I decided to go back to the last place I met "Risk" - This was a couple terms ago in ITPQM. I did a pretty decent risk assessment for the CW in that term so maybe if I look over some of the documentation I can remember how i went about doing a risk assesment then and use the steps to come up with some risks for the final project.
  
  
  

• The critical success factors came quite naturally after I FINALLY got some risks on paper.
  

Why I Did It

• I used a picture ... very close to a Concept Map to draw out my ideas for risks. The idea was brought forward in the DIS (Distributed Information Systems) class the previous saturday. I usually dont like drawings of any kind (I cannot, draw, paint, sketch; all my efforts look horrible). But when the lecturer explained the use of Mind Maps and Concept Mapping I thought the purpose fit the situation... where i could not get the ideas out of my head... so I tried it.
  The outcome was far from perfect but now I have some risks to work with.
  

Lessons Learned

A picture is worth a thousand .... pixels .... ideas ...

A simple answer is not a wrong answer. I struggled with the risks so much because I thought the simple ideas I had were wrong.

Just because this is a technical project does not mean every bitty part of it is complex.

What I Plan to Do

1. WBS
2. Relevance of other courses
   
3. Compile References
4. Start putting the entire proposal together