CSIR Day Four

Friday 18th June 2010: Today has been really good, as well as getting quite a lot of work done the group relationship is also growing strong, everyone is interacting well with each other and each day we learn a bit more about our individual lives outside INL 370 and this project something we suprisingly havent had a chance to do in the duration of our degree,just goes to show how busy life can get here at Tuks. We were alot more energetic today in terms finding work and evalauting it to reach a concensus in what we would include in the report.

The next deliverable is: Provide and analyse examples where these technologies(previously discussed) have been implemented by research communities in virtual knowledge spaces
Tasks:

• Analyse virtual spaces, their purpose and see which tools and technologies they implement
  
• Investigate Push technologies such as RSS Feeds

Phyllis,Sbonokuhle, Mathilda and I work on investigating push technologies, we decided to als evaluate pull technologies so that we could have a broad view on each aspect of technology. My part was to find examples of each form of technology. Below are my findings so far...

Pull technology also known as client pull is a form of network communication in which an initial request for data originates from the client and a response is received from a server; it forms the foundation of network computing in which clients request data from centralised servers. In terms of internet services this term refers to software that is used by individuals to retrieve information for themselves through a web browser. In other words it involves passing a specific user request to transfer the data to a user’s computer. This form of technology has four frequent uses and these are loading web pages, requesting mail, internet downloads and web syndication (group that forms an association for the sake of a common interest) to a newspaper.

According to Franklin, M and Zdonik, S, there are two types of pull as well as push technologies classification delivery mechanisms:

Aperiodic Pull – This is a traditional request/response mechanism that uses aperiodic pull over a unicast connection.

Periodic Pull – In some applications, such as remote sensing, a system may periodically send requests to other sites to obtain status information or to detect changed values. If the information is returned over a I-to-N link. Then as with request/response, other clients can snoop to obtain data items as they go by. Most existing web or Internet-based “push” systems are actually implemented using periodic Pull between the client machines and the data source(s).

Aperiodic Push - Publish/subscribe protocols are becoming a popular way to disseminate information in a network. In this system users provide information indicating the types of information they wish to receive. Publish/subscribe is push-based as data flow is initiated by the data sources.

Periodic Push - Periodic push has been used for data dissemination in many systems. An example of Periodic Push using unicast is Internet mailing lists that send out “digests” on a regular schedule. Such digests allow users to follow a mailing list without being continually interrupted by individual messages. This service is available on site such as Google in the form of google alerts

This is a brief summary of what i have so far and I will be updating this information as soon as i finish evaluating my sources.looking forward to the weekend its been a long week,but atleast now I have a feel of what research work involves.