Google Earth is a virtual globe program, allowing viewers to visualize data on top of displayed satellite images of the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2005 and released to the public in 2006, Google Earth fast became a household name hailed as a revolution for humanitarian development, much as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were several decades ago. According to MapAction, “There seem at present tobe two distinct groups of humanitarian practitioners: those who are already, albeit tentatively,exploiting Google Earth and related geospatial methods in their work,and those whowill be, as soon as they see their first demonstration of its potential.” (MapAction, 2008: 9)
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BioTeam first became interested in Univa UD’s software efforts after hearing Univa CTO Steve Tueckespeak in Regensburg, Germany at the 2007 Grid Engine workshop. Shortly after that event Univa formally became Univa UD after merging with United Devices. At the time, Steve’s company seemed to be one of the few companies positioning themselves to offer full support and professional services encompassing commonly used open source products such as Sun Grid Engine that BioTeam often works with in the field. Individually these popular open source resources are relatively easy to acquire but Univa UD seemed to be making an interesting effort to become the one stop shop for a fully supported and integrated set of commonly required tools and technology.
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So - you are wrapping up development of yet another Web app. The database is in place, CRUD functions are working, user interface and reports have been signed off. Now your thoughts are turning to access control. Just enough time to splice in that trusty user authentication and roles module, make a few tweaks and move on to the next project. Wait! Do you really want to contribute yet another authorization stovepipe to the growing forest? We all curse the proliferation of authentication and authorization “solutions” on the Web. Yet we continue to treat access control as an after thought.
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In general, the World Wide Web has a high potential as a platform for distributed groupware systems. Authors create and change documents locally and upload them to a Web server, where they can be accessed by their collaborators. However, Web browsers and servers which implement the protocol HTTP are mostly limited to provide reading access to Web documents. For this reason, existing Web-based groupware systems (e.g. the BSCW system) are implemented using client/server side scripting. These scripts are used to implement the basic operations needed for this kind of applications.
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By now, you’ve seen the articles about XML, separation of content and presentation, programmatic enforcement of content organization, structured authoring, and all the rest. You’ve considered XML publishing, but implementation looks difficult and expensive, and your current workflow is in reasonable shape. So you’ve been waiting for a compelling reason to make the transition.
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The most striking technology application in this century is the impact of web on the human life. The current period has witnessed the increased use of web to a greater extent and the Web 2.0 has made the cyberspace as the global information space. Web 2.0 is a collection of technologies and services that allow increased user-creator interaction, content syndication, advancements in web-based user interfaces, which ultimately lead to the creation of an entirely new application platform.
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Why Educators May Be Tempted to Say No to Web 2.0
In the face of the rapid changes on the Internet and the increased risks they bring, many schools, especially in the K-12 grades, have taken polar approaches to managing Web 2.0 within their schools. Some have opened the doors to these new opportunities, believing that their students and faculty should embrace these innovative applications in an effort to expand learning through online collaboration and sharing, while others have been quick to shut the door due to the potential costs and risks they may pose to younger students. In K-12 grades, the consensus seems to be to block these sites in order to protect students and their privacy from child predators and the potentially objectionable content that these real-time, dynamic sites may host.
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Many IT organizations view the phrase Web 2.0 as either just marketing hype that is devoid of any meaning or they associate it exclusively with social networking sites such as MySpace. That’s understandable as Web 2.0 is not the same as a new protocol that has an associated RFC that spells out definitively what is and what is not included as part of the protocol. As a result, many concepts get lumped under the banner of Web 2.0. In one of the most insightful analyses of Web 2.0, Tim Reilly points out that Web 2.0 involves fundamentally new design patterns and business models and he compares companies that were successful with Web 1.0 with those companies that are leading the movement to Web 2.0.
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