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.