Internet Applications:Mapping the territory

Why map?

• To help understand the space of existing applications and the technologies they use.

• To identify areas of high activity – where the action is.

• To identify areas of low activity – where there are market gaps.

• A kind of business intelligence.

Maps have dimensions

• A physical map has latitude, longitude and height

• Maps have a purpose – geographic, political, historical, energy usage…

• Conceptual maps need dimensions too.

Tools for conceptual maps

• Structures– Graphical Mindmaps – spider diagrams – Tony Buzan– Formal

• Topic maps• RDF

• Tools– Graphical

• FreeMind– Text

• Our Ajax SMS whiteboard• 37Signals WriteBoard

– Conceptual• Protégé• Jena

Possible dimensions

• Purpose or function– Blog, wiki, social book mark, photo sharing,

auction, gambling…

• Application architecture– Desktop, web-hosted, Rich Internet

Application (RIA), mashup

• Implementation technologies– Ajax, J2EE, XQuery, RDBMS..

• …..

Simple SMS example

• SMS applications– http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~cjwallac/apps/

sms/

• The current Poll– http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~cjwallac/apps/

poll2/tally.php%3fpollid=4–

AJAX whiteboard

• Our Ajax SMS whiteboard

Simple mashup• Flickr/GoogleEarth

– Working area– Flickr function

• Function: photosharing• Architecture: RIA• Implementation : javascript, php….

– Google Earth• Function: mapping• Architecture: desktop • Implementation : ??

• Keywords– API – Application Programmer Interface– XML – generic markup language– Kml – XML vocabulary used in GoogleEarth– XQuery – XML query language