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Information Access and Connectivity. Richard N. Taylor University of California, Irvine taylor@uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~taylor/. Key Insights and Motivator. Software is a complex information product a web of artifacts, processes, stakeholders
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Information Access and Connectivity Richard N. TaylorUniversity of California, Irvine taylor@uci.eduhttp://www.ics.uci.edu/~taylor/
Key Insights and Motivator • Software is a complex information product • a web of artifacts, processes, stakeholders • Software is but one kind of complex information product: • the technologies developed to support its creation and evolution can be used and adapted to support other kinds of complex information products (CIPs) • research to support other CIPs can be adapted and extended to support software
Evolution of the World Wide Web • The “Berners-Lee” Web (1989-1994+) • Exponential Web growth threatened the Internet • Protocols assumed a direct connection between browser and server • no awareness of caching, proxies or spiders • no guidance for protocol extensions • The modern WWW (1995-present) • Key differences, reflecting software engineering influences • The model software architecture • HTTP/1.1 • URIs • WebDAV • Key driver in evolution: enabling the Web to support “global software engineering”
Participants, Citations, and Products • HTTP/1.1 protocol specification • Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1. (Fielding, Gettys, Mogul, Frystyk, Berners-Lee, Masinter, Leach). Internet Draft Standard RFC 2616, June 1999. Obsoletes RFC 2068. • URI specification • Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax. (Berners-Lee, Fielding, Masinter). Internet Draft Standard RFC 2396, August 1998. • Relative Uniform Resource Locators. (Fielding). Internet Proposed Standard RFC 1808, June 1995. • WebDAV protocol specification • HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring -- WebDAV. (Yaron Goland, Jim Whitehead, Asad Faizi, Steve Carter, Del Jensen) Internet Draft Standard RFC 2518. February 1999. • WebDAV: IETF Standard for Collaborative Authoring on the Web (E. James Whitehead, Jr., Meredith Wiggins) IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 2, No. 5, September/October, 1998, pages 34-40. • Apache web server (55% of world market share) • The Apache HTTP Server Project (Fielding, Kaiser). IEEE Internet Computing, 1(4), July-Aug. 1997. • Shared Leadership in the Apache Project. (Fielding). Communications of the ACM, 42(4), April 1999, pp. 42-43.
Allied Fields and Science Base • Software architecture: source of the fundamental model for how the modern WWW is built • “Representational state transfer” • Human-computer interaction: importance of the user’s perception of latency • Hypermedia: source of many core concepts and a primary usage mode • The network protocol stack • Configuration management • CSCW: collaborative authoring; concurrency control • Software engineering environments: data integration; application interoperability
Sample Directions • Near-term: Improved Web-based development of complex information products • Whether for global software engineering, aircraft design, advertising campaigns, curricula, ... • Sample Issues • Linking all artifacts, tools, and processes • Management of artifacts and relationships over time • Distributed change management, awareness, & task coordination • Longer-term: “Next-generation WWW”: • Anytime, anywhere knowledge of what you need to know to accomplish your purposes, and ability to interact in that context.
Anytime, Anywhere Information & Interaction • A software engineering use: software “maintenance” • Integration of • all artifacts involved • all developers • all deployed versions • all users • the usage context • Applied recursively through systems-of-systems • To enable • Awareness, effective update, assessment, monitoring, enhancement, integration, ... • Some non-software engineering uses (with strong overlap in the fundamental issues): • Crisis management systems – Process control • World-wide, just-in-time everything – Logistics • Air traffic control – Medical informatics
Science & Technology Base • Event-based systems/implicit notification • Software architectures • Task models • Protocols • Names & namespaces • Information meta-models • Security • Information Retrieval • Information theory • Performance models • Wireless technologies • Economics: incremental deployment, network effects
A Few Challenges & Contribution Areas • Scale • Large numbers of event sources, event consumers, types of information, amounts of information --- constantly changing • How do you describe this? Reason about it? Deal with it? • Geographical distribution --- latency issues • Observation, experimentation, evaluation • How do you do this, on such a scale, with such dynamism? • Usage • Information description, recognition, search, mining • Interface design; information overload • Assurances: quality, reliability, availability, ... • Public policies • e.g., Taxation, safety, conflicts in nations’ laws