Webwork
An Application Portal Vision

Glossary and Related Links

Annotation

ThirdVoice.com: a web "sticky notes" service that allowed users to annotate web pages of their choice. In an evolution of ThirdVoice 2000, it says "enables all words on the Web to become Active Words - words that users can select to instantly obtain relevant content, commerce and communities specific to the selected text." (Wired article about ThirdVoice)

Application Hosting

Application Hosting (also known as Application Outsourcing, Internet Applications Hosting and others) is an emerging business model for delivering application services that are hosted on servers by Application Service Providers (ASPs). See Portal and Education Portal.

• AOL <http://www.aol.com>: Internet Service Provider America Online (AOL) promotes "AOL Anytime, Anywhere" (access to e-mail, calendar, etc.) via the AOL web site.
• AppCity: A former portal site that includes a fairly long list of applications. In addition, AppZapper is an application builder that allows users to create their own applications.
• Desktop.com <http://www.desktop.com/>: Another free application site, which is actively seeking developers to write applications for their platform. DHTML-based, works in both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Offers a development platform for new applications. They recently announced a major restructuring of their APIs to "lower the barriers to developing for its platform", as well as making it possible to use capabilities specific to Internet Explorer 5.
• Encanto <http://www.encanto.com/>: Wants to be "America Online for small businesses": an ASP specializing in small-business customers.
• FreeDesk.com: Was a full suite of Java-based office productivity applications. Offers file sharing to support collaboration. There is also a clumsy form of real-time collaboration. Two or more people sharing a login name and password can have editable versions of a file open at the same time. One person makes and saves changes, then the other people must reload the changed document.
• halfbrain.com: Was a fully featured web-based spreadsheet. Required Internet Explorer 5 on Windows.
• Jamcracker <http://www.jamcracker.com/>: Wants to act as an ASP integrator, hoping to bring together dozens of ASP offerings in a single service managed and maintained by Jamcracker.
• MagicalDesk <http://www.magicaldesk.com/>: Includes e-mail, calendar, address book, to do list, and file sharing.
• Microsoft Office Online : Was Microsoft's offering in the ASP market. Used Windows Terminal Server to remotely display Windows sessions.
• MyInternetDesktop.com <http://www.MyInternetDesktop.com/>: Includes the common applications plus a simple word processor. Offers an open API for application developers.
• myWebOS.com: Was an operating platform that made the World Wide Web an application and data network for personal users, small to mid-size businesses, and the enterprise. myWebOS is a development platform for building applications.
• Personable.com <http://www.personable.com/>: This fee-based application service provides access to Microsoft Office 2000 applications via a plugin on Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator running on Windows. Doesn't work through firewalls. See PC News Review article <http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,14369,00.asp#>
• Plumtree <http://www.plumtree.com/>:
• StarPortal: Was the portal-based version of an office productivity suite, owned by Sun.
• ThinkFree <http://www.thinkfree.com/>: A Web-based Microsoft Office style-application, written in Java. Early experiments at Sun were only successful using Internet Explorer on a PC. They offer storage on their secure web site for remote access to your data. They claim to automatically sync your local hard disk copy with the remotely stored one so that you can opt to work on-line or off-line.
• Visto.com <http://www.visto.com/>: A "free web-based communications center" with the usual communication apps. Special features include support for group collaboration and cell phone access to e-mail, address book, calendar and to do list.
• WebHarbor.com: WebHarbor provided corporate and individual users with access to information on the ASP marketplace, which delivers timeshare applications on a per-use basis.

Application Service Provider (ASP)

See Application Hosting

Awareness

In the Webwork Portal, communication can be facilitated by incidental Awareness of other people's activities, for example by knowing that somebody else is concurrently viewing a document. See also Remote Collaboration.

Contact Port

In the Webwork Portal the Contact Port is the basic means of contacting and interacting with other people. See also Asynchronous Collaboration.

Data Interchange & Brokerage

Standard information objects (e.g. business cards, appointments) follow industry standards for interoperation across portal sites. A rapidly increasing number of such standards are being written in XML.

• Customer Profile Exchange (CPEX): Was "a vendor-neutral open standard for sharing customer data across disparate applications and systems," expected to be XML-based
• IMS Global Learning Consortium <http://www.imsproject.org/>: a global coalition of more than 200 educational institutions, commercial organizations and government entities defining standards for distributed learning. Sun is helping develop an XML-based standard, with supporting tools, within this framework.
• XBRL: "The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and 30+ other organizations have joined forces to create an XML-based specification for the preparation and exchange of financial reports and data."
• Zkey: Hosted standard applications such as calendar, addressbook, and e-mail, but mainly promote themselves as a "clearinghouse of personal information on the web - providing the central identity repository for users' every online activity." Other companies (e.g. Microsoft and Yahoo!) have also taken steps toward becoming identity brokers. See also People Objects.

Documents Neighborhood

In the Webwork Portal the Documents Neighborhood lists documents that are related to the active document. Documents might be word processing or spreadsheets documents, as well as email messages and attachments and others.

Education Portal

An education portal specializes the portal concept with resources, in particular hosted applications, suited for the education community. Behind this is the idea that schools, especially K12, generally have a hard time with IT, and that these needs might be better met via outsourcing through a portal. See also Application Hosting, Portal, and SchoolTone Alliance.

• Blackboard <http://Blackboard.com/>: Access course materials, chat, discussions
• Campus Pipeline (now SunGuard Higher Education) <http://www.campuspipeline.com/>: Aimed at colleges. Provides e-mail, chat (office hours), administrative functions.
• Family Education Network <http://www.familyeducation.com/>: More a web site than a portal. Primarily information for parents, although there are some software downloads.
• Learning Station <http://www.LearningStation.com/>: E-mail, calendar, address book, MS Office (using Citrix ICA) .
• MediaSeek Technologies Inc. <http://www.MediaSeek.com/>: Focused on curriculum development.
• PowerSchool <http://www.powerschool.com/>: As they say in their promo, "PowerSchool is the leading provider of web-based student information systems to K-12 schools. Our objective is to partner with schools to improve the quality and effectiveness of education by empowering students, parents, and educators with real-time information, relevant assessment tools and access to educational resources online."
• ThinkWave <http://www.thinkwave.com/>: Classroom-based site provides access to assignments, grades, handouts, student performance. Free, supported by advertising.
• ZapMe! <http://www.zapme.com/>: Provides typical portal features for students and teachers with candy-style control panel, including mail and bulletin board. They also provide MS Office, but it's not clear whether the application and file storage are local or remote. Company provides schools with computers fed via satellite dish and local cache. Features advertising.

Flexible Application Sharing

Flexible application sharing provides better support for collaboration than simple application sharing. This is accomplished by dynamically replacing standard single-user interface components with multi-user equivalents (e.g., scroll pane --> multi-user radar pane). The multi-user components allow collaborators to view and work in separate portions of the shared data simultaneously. They also provide activity information to support collaborators' awareness of each other's activities. See Flexible JAMM <http://simon.cs.vt.edu/jamm/> or Flexible Collaboration Transparency <http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/tochi/1999-6-2/p95-begole/>.

Handles

.....
See <http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/>

History Neighborhood

In the Webwork Portal the History Neighborhood provides access to recently used documents.

Internet Telephony

Telephony over the Internet, also known as Voice Over IP (VOIP) permits voice communication among computer users without use of the traditional telephone network.

• Net2Phone <http://www.net2phone.com/>: sells telephone calls over the Internet. Although apparently a competitor of AT&T, they have joint promotion and AT&T have apparently acquired a minority stake. Net2Phone support is to be bundled with the Netscape version 6 browser, and they have alliances with many other major players (for example Panasonic, 3Com, RealNetworks, Samsung, and Scientific-Atlanta, and WebEx).

Live Help

An approach to providing help to computer users via interaction with other people, typically mediated by computer and communication technologies.

• Askanexpert.com <http://www.askanexpert.com/>: a web site that helps you locate other web sites relevant to your question that are maintained by experts, where you might either find an answer or submit a question to the expert.
• AskMe.com <http://www.askme.com/>: "ask questions, and real people provide the answers. Select a category from the AskMe.com home page, and pick an Expert to ask a question."
• ExpertCity: Was "The place to go for live computer help, training, and help".
• HotDispatch: Was "a marketplace where people buy and sell technical expertise one question or project at a time."

Multipoint Communication Service

<http://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/rec/t/t122.htm>. The ITU T.122 Multipoint Communication Service specifies the concepts of sessions and session-wide communication abstractions called channels.

Neighborhood

In the Webwork Portal the Neighborhood automatically displays lists of people and documents that are likely to be related to the current document

Orthogonal Persistence

A technology that preserves, across multiple executions, the runtime state of a program with very little requirement for application-level support.

• GemStone <http://www.gemstone.com/>: The Gemstone Persistent Cache Architecture for Java provides a shared memory and persistent object environment for multiple instances of the GemStone/J VM, permitting object persistence with very little perturbation of application code. Although positioned as a technology for application servers, it is in fact more of an Object Oriented Database (OODB). It also supports distributed transaction management (CORBA-based), clustering, and load balancing. Although there are competitors in this space, none at present appears to offer the same level of support with as little demand placed on application code.
• PJama <http://www.sun.com/research/forest/>: an experimental Java Virtual Machine developed at Sun Labs that permits extremely large Java heaps to be preserved, as long as needed, without special application coding; PJama is considerably more "orthogonal" (requiring less special coding) than its nearest commercial counterpart Gemstone. Already fundamentally transactional, this technology is being extended by flexible transaction support within the VM.
• Spotless <http://www.sun.com/research/spotless/>: an experimental Java Virtual Machine developed at Sun Labs that permits Java applications running under PalmOS to be preserved, as long as needed, without special application coding. In contrast, conventional Palm applications are required to preserve runtime state into a system-provided string database just before the OS switches to another application. Furthermore, a clone of a suspended spotless application can be beamed to another machine for independent resumption.

People Neighborhood

In the Webwork Portal the People Neighborhood lists people who are related to the active document.

People Objects

Portal applications use an interface component that provides up-to-the-minute activity information and convenient communication access to the person wherever a reference to a person appears (e.g., the FROM: field of an e-mail). The interface would provide quick access to communication tools, such as e-mail, chat, voice, etc. For example, an e-mail viewer would show up-to-the-minute activity information for the sender of a message shown in the FROM field. See also Data Interchange:Zkey and Tsunami People Objects.

Portal

A general portal is currently understood to be a web site where a number of links, (increasingly personalizable) and other resources (especially searching) can be found. General portals do not yet promote the concept of Application Hosting, but services offered are increasing. An increasing number of portals are directed and specific populations. See also Application Hosting, Education Portal, and Asynchronous Collaboration

• AltaVista <http://www.altavista.com/>: Lots of functionality, including HTML editing for home page construction.
• Go2Net <http://www.go2net.com/>: Primarily links to other sites with functionality.
• Netscape Netcenter <http://www.netscape.com/>: Typical commercial portal.
• SAGEport: Was a portal for senior citizens.
• Yahoo <http://www.yahoo.com/>: Typical commercial portal.

Radar pane

A radar pane is a multi-user interface component that provides the functionality of a scroll pane. It allows each collaborator to have an independent view of the scrolled space. A miniature view of the scrolled space is displayed and each collaborator's view position is shown by a uniquely colored rectangle. The following images shows two users working in a shared word-processing document.
See also Asynchronous Collaboration.

Asynchronous Collaboration

Working and communicating with other people at different times. See also Flexible Application Sharing

• eCircles: Was web-based support for starting a discussion, planning an event, sharing photos, sharing music, and creating "places" that bundle together multiple activities.
• eGroups (now Yahoo Groups) <http://www.egroups.com/>: "free e-mail group service that allows you to easily create and join e-mail groups. E-mail groups offer a convenient way to connect with others who share the same interests and ideas."
• Hipbone: "enables sales and customer support agents to "connect browsers" with customers and navigate the web together."
• Intranets.com: Was a portal site that allows groups to set up their own "intranets." It includes shared documents, a group calendar, a group address book, a shared bookmark list, and group announcements. There is no way to create documents. They must be imported from the user's hard disk.
• NetMeeting <http://www.microsoft.com/windows/netmeeting/>: an application-sharing system that allows multiple users to work together using existing single-user Windows applications. It interoperates with SunForum allowing collaborators to share a mix of Windows- and X-based applications.
• SunForum <http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/805-4479-12>: an application-sharing system that allows multiple users to work together using existing single-user X Windows applications. Interoperates with NetMeeting allowing collaborators to share a mix of Windows- and X-based applications.
• WebEx <http://www.webex.com/>: "a free, real-time conferencing service that allows users to set up private, interactive, collaborative meetings on the Web. A complete suite of tools is available to navigate, markup and interact live, in real-time, whether on documents in progress or on the Web (with interactive whiteboard capabilities just added). WebEx is now the designated meeting place for hundreds of companies and associations."

SchoolTone Alliance

"The SchoolTone Alliance was a global partnership of leading education service providers who collaborate to create web-based portals." See also Education Portal.

Social Help

In the Webwork Portal Social Help helps a user tap into an existing social network of known and trusted people to ask for help on resolving an issue. This not only enables the help to be live and interactive, but also personalizes the help, based on the context of the existing relationship. See also Live Help.

Telephony Integration

In the Webwork Portal, Telephony Integration in one of several basic communication channels for people. It is anticipated that Internet Telephony will be integrated with many web-based services. See also Internet Telephony

• AskJeeves (now Ask.com) <http://www.askjeeves.com/>: in addition to its free search engine, AskJeeves supplies "help-desk" technology to corporate customers for assisting customers and partners. According to an Inter@ctive Week article, they intend to integrate VOIP with these services. VOIP would be the "final event of an escalation path."
• HearMe <http://www.hearme.com/>: the VoiceCONTACT service supports browser-based VOIP conversations, with conversations initiated via e-mail.
• WebEx/Net2Phone: WebEx (see Remote Collaboration) and Net2Phone (see Internet Telephony) have announced an a strategic alliance to integrate the two web-based communication services into each other's offerings.

Telepointer

A telepointer is a representation of a remote user's screen cursor. Unique shapes, colors and labels can be used to distinguish each collaborator's telepointer. The following image shows telepointers of two users.

See also Remote Collaboration.

Universal Document Viewers

Portal guarantees that any documents created using applications in the portal are viewable to any one else with a browser. The portal provides viewers to all portal-based documents. At worst, the portal can render the data as a GIF or JPEG image. To implement this guarantee, document type information needs to be available - location of the type information (MIME type in the Handles versus type stored within the document on the portal) is an implementation detail that needs to be determined. A promising development for default viewing is the move toward XML as a standard data representation, especially on the wire, for many kinds of documents. Generic style sheets, also part of the XML standard, will support default viewing by any XML-enabled browser.

Voice Over IP (VOIP)

See Internet Telephony

WebDAV

WebDAV <http://www.webdav.org/> extends the Internet protocol HTTP so that a server can work as a repository for both reading and collaborative authoring; in addition to reading a web page you might change it and update it on the server. The current WebDAV extension adds

1. properties on web pages (e.g. title, subject, creator, etc.),
2. web page locking (so that changes don't get overwritten), and
3. ways to manage the names of web pages.

Future extensions will support versioning of web pages, aggregations/configurations of web pages, and perhaps others. A good source of information is Jim Whitehead's web site <http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/>.

Xymphonic transaction model (formerly Apotram)

The xymphonic transaction model <http://www.xymphonic.com/> is a theoretical model for concurrent work that is grounded in the technology of databases. As a generalization to classical transaction theory, The xymphonic transaction model promises to make transactional systems flexible enough to support user-level collaboration, but without sacrificing the guarantees of data integrity that transactions offer.