Abstract

Information Systems are a large class of computer applications which revolve around information as a resource. The World Wide Web (WWW) is the most popular and biggest information system available today. Many other information systems are designed as stand-alone systems, but increasingly are integrated into the Web architecture, leveraging the popularity and global availability of the Web. Because of this integration, it is important to understand the Web as an information system, rather than a delivery system for Web pages.

Organization

• Course times: 9.30-12.45 & 14.15-17.30
• Goal: 50% lecture, 50% exercises
• Final exam will be a written test

About Me

• Apprenticeship at Hahn-Meitner-Institut Berlin (HMI) (85-88)
• Computer Science at Technical University of Berlin (TUB) (88-91)
  • working on DAPHNE, an SGML-based document preparation system
• Ph.D. at ETH Zürich (92-97)
  • thesis on Group and Session Management for Collaborative Applications
• Post-Doc at ICSI, Berkeley (97/98)
  • book on Technical Foundations of the World Wide Web
• Various activities back in Switzerland (98-06)
  • teaching at ETH Zürich and FHNW
  • working as independent consultant (training, courses, consulting)
  • research in various XML-related areas
  • starting and leading the ShaRef project
• Visiting Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley iSchool

About this Course

• Course Web page: http://dret.net/lectures/infosys-ws06/
• Comments about the lecture notes are highly welcome
• The more you ask, the more you learn

About You

About these Slides

• Generated from XSLidy XML
  • all Slidy presentations are generated from this source
  • toc.html for displaying the summary on the course's Web page
• Designed for online presentation and use (lots of links!)
  • for printing, use a (all slides), and s (smaller font) a couple of times
• A good real-world example for XML applications
  • Slidy is useful, but there is no support for structures and hyperlinking
  • XSLidy adds these features by adding an XSLT transformation
  • XSLidy is useful, but there is no interface (XML editing only)
  • additional functionality can easily by incorporated (e.g., FormuLaTeX)

Additional Resources

• My Online Glossary at http://dret.net/glossary/
  • suggestions, updates, corrections are very welcome
  • another exercise in how to use XML and XSLT for information management
• My bibliography at http://dret.net/biblio/
  • suggestions, updates, corrections are very welcome
  • produced by an XML-centric system for managing bibliography data
• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  • the organization which invented HTTP and SOAP
  • as well as many other technologies covered in this course
• The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)
  • the organization which controls many important Web Service specifications

The Big Picture

• The Web is more than a collection of Web pages
  • a hypermedia system which essentially provides one huge interconnected document
  • an information system which can be used as an integration platform
• Several aspects make the Web particularly challenging
  • there is no central control and no central responsibility
  • it is growing into unforeseen areas (mobile Web, ubiquitous Web)
  • there is no fixed way of building things
  • many companies have Web-unfriendly business models
• Being a media or information professional is hard
  • it is necessary to look at the bigger picture when making decisions
  • being right not always means that everybody likes you
  • learning what is right is hard and needs constant updates

The Plan

1. Look at the Web and how it works
   • we will only look at what is relevant for the information system view
2. With this in mind, look at some principles of information systems
   • focus is on information organization and document engineering
3. XML is the technology driving many applications today
   • we look at XML, schemas, information extraction, and transformations
4. Relational databases is the other important information paradigm
   • focus on the model and the technology for querying data
5. Code is the glue holding everything together
   • we will only look at some examples and a taxonomy of Web programming languages

• The course home page has more detailed information

Expand Your View

• Most of you have experiences in some of these areas
  • share them and help your fellow students
• Connecting them with other areas is the challenge
  • this is what separates information from knowledge: the context

Putting Media in Context

• Media often are part of a bigger system
• Understanding the context will help you
• The ideal professional has breadth and depth