RACC WEB 200
Web E-Commerce
Ch. 2 Lecture Notes

Objective #1: Explain the origin and the growth of the Internet.

  • ARPANET & Defense Dep't
  • role of NSF
  • commerical ISP's such as Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL
  • growth of email
  • various protocols and uses including email, telnet, FTP, gopher, etc
  • Tim Berners-Lee created web server, HTML, & http
  • graphical browsers Mosaic, Netscape, IE
  • development tools Java, Javascript, ActiveX, Flash
  • search engines Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, Google

Objective #2: Explain the history of markup languages including HTML, XML, & SGML

  • SGML - a language used to create other languages
  • HTML - created by Tim Berners-Lee to allow hyperlinks
  • XML - used to create specific DTD's etc
  • CSS - role in display & formatting

Objective #3: List characteristics of Web 2.0 and its impact on the Second Wave of Ecommerce.

  • The Web 2.0 is loose term referring to second generation of services available on the Web especially ones that allow people to collaborate and share information online. Technologies of Web 2.0 allow web surfers to have an experience surfing the Web that's more like using desktop applications.
  • Examples: Wikipedia, Digg, del.icio.us, salesforce.com, Google Maps, blinkx.com, blinkx.tv, writely.com, Six Apart (Movable Type), JotSpot, 30boxes, Jigsaw Data
  • Examples of new technologies: AJAX, RSS, Blog, mash-ups, OpenLaszlo, Web services, web syndication, wikipedias, tags, podcasts.
  • Web 3.0
    • Tim Berners-Lee & the W3C standards for the Semantic Web
      • to make content data-aware
      • Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI's)- every URL Web address is a type of URI
      • Resource Description Framework (RDF) - describes Web-based content so it's understandable to machines. For example, FOAF (Friend of a Friend) files are files about people. A FOAF file for John Doe makes it possible for a program to know that there is such a person and that he has web sites and business affiliations. Those friends affiliations have their own FOAF and RDF files so the program can follow those links.
      • Web Ontology Language (OWL) - the ability to define ontologies for categorizing and classifying groups of related data
      • SPARQL - brings SQL-like querying capabilities to RDF
      • DBpedia.org - project to apply Semantic Web technologies to wikipedia.org
      • Joost - applying Semantic Web technologies to online t.v. schedule
      • Zepheira - company that helps apply Semantic Web to business databases
      • current, free tools for developing Semantic Web
        • Tabulator - w3.org/2005/ajar/tab - browses through RDF data directly from a web browser
        • Cwm - w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/cwm.html - processes Semantic Web data
        • SIMILE - simile.mit.edu includes Piggy Bank, a Firefox extension, and Welkin, a graphical visualization tool for RDF data sets
      • commercial tools for business Semantic Web solutions (available as free demos) - list at esw.w3.org/topic/CommercialProducts
        • SemanticWorks 2007 - a visual RDF and OWL editor from altova.com
        • RDF Gateway - web & application server
        • TopBraid Composer - design OWL ontologies and build applications

Objective #4: Internet Timeline