HELP! * GREY=local Full HTML for

LOCAL foilset General Description of NPAC's and InfoMall's Webserver Activities

Given by Geoffrey C. Fox at General Description on January 1995. Foils prepared April 4,1995
Abstract * Foil Index for this file

See also color IMAGE
We discuss the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) as a set of several million clients (Set-Top boxes/PC's) linked by ATM networks to perhaps some ten thousand supercomputer class HPCC servers. This Infrastructure will support a set of base information services:
InfoVision or Information(text), Video, Imagery, and Simulation ON Demand. It is reasonably clear what we need to implement this and we describe how base HPCC technologies can be used in InfoVision.
InfoVision services can be used in defense (called Command and Control historically), Society and Business. We discuss our virtual corporation InfoMall and its early application testbeds with special attention to the Living Textbook where 6 schools are connected by high speed ATM networks to HPCC servers at NPAC. Here InfoVision services under development include video news clips browsed by a text database, images, HPCC environmental simulations and a 3D terrain navigation system with multimedia data arranged over New York State. Another basic service is that of a both automatic and teacher controlled cache of information from the internet.
Note this talk contained World Wide Web illustrative pages and material from InfoMall95 and InfoVision95 as well as foils contained here.

Table of Contents for full HTML of General Description of NPAC's and InfoMall's Webserver Activities

1 Opportunities on the Interface of Parallel Computing and High Speed Networks
InfoVision:
Basic Services and Applications with the Use of HPCC to Implement the Global Information Infrastructure
2 Abstract of Web Server Presentation
3 InfoMall Focus Areas and Base Infrastructure
4 Comments on FLAG and Web Servers
Fiber Optic Link Across the Globe
5 What is a Web or HPMMCC Network Server ?
6 Importance of Hierarchical Server Architecture in InfoVision
7 A Typical Hierarchical Server Network
8 Historical Overview of World Wide Web and Mosaic -- I
9 Historical Overview of World Wide Web and Mosaic -- II
10 The World Wide Web and Mosaic Phenomenon as Killer Applications -- I
11 The World Wide Web and Mosaic Phenomenon as Killer Applications -- II
12 Caching of Internet Data on HPCC Server at NPAC
13 Total Information on the Internet
14 Traffic on the World Wide Web
15 WWW Server Growth Statistics
16 KidsWeb Access Statistics
17 Comments on Storage of Movies on HPCC WebServers
18 InfoMall Features and Capabilities
19 Some InfoMall Services in Web Technology Area
20 InfoMall Application Testbeds in Education Arena
21 Motivation and Backdrop of Living Textbook Project
22 Overview of the Living Textbook Project
23 The Living Textbook Project Partners
24 Outside Partners of the Living Textbook Project
25 New York State -- The Interactive Journey
26 Content of New York State -- The Interactive Journey
27 Video on Demand in Living Textbook
28 Cached Internet Resources in Living Textbook Project
29 Curricula Opportunities Opened Up by the World Wide Web
30 Encyclopedia Galactica or Hyperlinked Approach to Educational Material
31 Degrees courses offered over the NII (Internet)
32 NPAC -- SUNY Health Science Center Collaboration - I
33 NPAC -- SUNY Health Science Center Collaboration - II
34 Overview of Some Expected Pervasive Early Digital Applications
35 VASTNET -- NPAC, Newhouse School, University Electronic Media Services Collaboration
36 Government Information Systems
i.e. Digital Service Opportunities in Government arena
37 The Technical Structure of the World Wide Web -- Basic System
38 The Technical Structure of the World Wide Web -- Components
39 The Hyperworld of New Interactive Media
40 Web Software Technologies and Standards I
41 Web Software Technologies and Standards II
42 Recent Developments in WWW Tools and Standards
43 Industrial Activities Relevant to WWW Technologies
44 Relationship between Current Commercial and World Wide Web Technologies

This table of Contents Abstract

HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 1 Opportunities on the Interface of Parallel Computing and High Speed Networks
InfoVision:
Basic Services and Applications with the Use of HPCC to Implement the Global Information Infrastructure

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
January 18, 1995
Presentation for CPS600 by Geoffrey Fox
NPAC
111 College Place
Syracuse NY 13244-4100
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 2 Abstract of Web Server Presentation

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
We discuss the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) as a set of several million clients (Set-Top boxes/PC's) linked by ATM networks to perhaps some ten thousand supercomputer class HPCC servers. This Infrastructure will support a set of base information services:
InfoVision or Information(text), Video, Imagery, and Simulation ON Demand. It is reasonably clear what we need to implement this and we describe how base HPCC technologies can be used in InfoVision.
InfoVision services can be used in defense (called Command and Control historically), Society and Business. We discuss our virtual corporation InfoMall and its early application testbeds with special attention to the Living Textbook where 6 schools are connected by high speed ATM networks to HPCC servers at NPAC. Here InfoVision services under development include video news clips browsed by a text database, images, HPCC environmental simulations and a 3D terrain navigation system with multimedia data arranged over New York State. Another basic service is that of a both automatic and teacher controlled cache of information from the internet.
Note this talk contained World Wide Web illustrative pages and material from InfoMall95 and InfoVision95 as well as foils contained here.
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 3 InfoMall Focus Areas and Base Infrastructure

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Key Features of InfoMall
  • Use of High speed Networks
  • Growing Importance of Large Scale Databases for Multimedia Information and Decision Support
  • Use of Parallel Computer Servers
  • Virtual Corporation Implementation of a High Technology Organization
Infrastructure
  • NYNET as a prototype of the
    • GII -- Global Information Infrastructure and
    • A regional or community network (Upstate or Downstate Portion viewed separately)
  • Parallel and Other High Performance Computing Capabilities at NYNET nodes
    • Cornell,NPAC(Syracuse University),Rome Laboratory ...
    • FLAG -- Fiberlink Across the Globe -- the World Wide InfoMall initially linking Africa to Western World
    • NPAC is working with contacts in Africa to provide InfoMall Digital services to franchises in South Africa, Morocco, Ivory Coast etc.
  • Internal Networks such as VASTNET linking NPAC to Newhouse and other units of the University (Physics, Maxwell)
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 4 Comments on FLAG and Web Servers
Fiber Optic Link Across the Globe

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
FLAG is an enterprise in which NYNEX Network Systems Company is a major (roughly 40%) investor.
Current fiber link from U.K. to Japan (via Africa) is being constructed at a $1.4B cost
InfoMall is proposed as USA distributor of Information services to Africa
  • George Langworth of NYNEX is the Africa Business Developer for FLAG
Current Contacts and potential InfoMall tenants are:
  • MultiTel: South Africa
  • Access: Ivory Coast
  • ONPT - Morocco
These will typically lease 64Kbit lines from NYNEX and FLAG to run from FLAG offramp in Africa to NPAC
NPAC will supply technology to link Web Server at NPAC to Web Servers in Africa
  • High-end PC's should be included as possible Web server even we use SP-2, nCUBE3 or multi-processor SGI in NPAC
  • Real-Time Compression critical on FLAG as lines are costly -- note Internet is free but needs compression as overloaded ....
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 5 What is a Web or HPMMCC Network Server ?

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * Critical Information in IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Web Servers use "Web Technology" to service World Wide Web and other forms of networked multimedia information
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 6 Importance of Hierarchical Server Architecture in InfoVision

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Hypothesis: Multimedia Information with real time video will be very important and require a megabit/second bandwidth or more per client
The total national network bandwidth needed is minimized if server is near to the client
It is least expensive to install local rather national or state high speed links
Deduction: We have familiar "Data Locality" problem of Parallel Computing
Hypothesis: It is possible to define "communities" so that most material accessed by many (in particular more than one) people.
Data replication in hierarchical fashion is known solution with "pre-fetching", "caching" and "cache coherence" as issues
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 7 A Typical Hierarchical Server Network

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * Critical Information in IMAGE
Full HTML Index
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 8 Historical Overview of World Wide Web and Mosaic -- I

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Today's Explosion of use of the Internet stems from two developments
  • The World Wide Web (WWW) which established Universal Naming and Access of Computer Resources and
  • Mosaic the first easily available powerful program to browse these resources
World Wide Web Project at CERN 1989
  • Started by HIgh Energy Physicists (HEP) in CERN, Geneva
  • Spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee
  • The goal was to allow large (upto 1000 PhD's) geographically distributed HEP collaborations, exchange text (papers) and pictures (plots, diagrams etc.)
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 9 Historical Overview of World Wide Web and Mosaic -- II

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
NCSA Mosaic 1993
  • Started as a small project inspired by Berners-Lee visit
  • Involved team of NCSA/UIUC undergraduates led by Marc Andreessen
  • The goal was to make the WWW more usable
  • First public release of Mosaic was summer 1993 but
  • New York Times article in december 1993 triggered world-wide interest
Commercial Web Products
  • Mosaic developers join with Clark from Silicon Graphics to form the Netscape Communication Corporation
  • Another set of Commercial implementations of NCSA Mosaic by official NCSA licensees
  • There is built in Web Browsing support in the new generation of PC Software including OS/2 ver 3.0 and Windows95/Chicago
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 10 The World Wide Web and Mosaic Phenomenon as Killer Applications -- I

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Why was WWW/Mosaic so succesful so quickly ?
  • Perfect timing to take advantage of press coverage of information superhighway and Gore's Nation al Information Infrastructure
  • Free but very high quality software which compared very favorably with:
    • Commercial PC Multimedia authoring and interface software which are non standard complex and confusing
  • The amount of open software reached a critical size when one can start building free systems out of free components. The Internet itself allowed convenient access to and dissemination of this material
Where will WWW/Mosaic go next ?
  • Near term situation is unclear as there is competition in standards and implementations between NCSA (Originating institution) + licensees and the Original authors now in NCC (Netscape Corp.)
  • In the long term both this mode of producing software and the product itself will have profound impact on the whole computing industry
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 11 The World Wide Web and Mosaic Phenomenon as Killer Applications -- II

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Why is WWW/Mosaic relevant for everybody?
  • At the high end, WWW/Mosaic will motivate use of parallel computers as Webservers
  • At the low end, already IBM and Microsoft will incorporate Web browsers in the new releases of their operating systems.
  • Note that these standards were set outside these giants which are following others' standards -- not selling proprietary systems.
  • The Web will play in the 1990's the same role that the PC did in the 80's and will impact all new coming interactive technologies
  • Further Interactive multimedia will be dominant computer and communications market 5 to 10 years from now
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 12 Caching of Internet Data on HPCC Server at NPAC

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Servers at NPAC will fetch data from internet (GII) and store on local disks
  • This allows teacher selection of information of relevance -- equivalent to teacher selecting a set of reference books from the library.
  • This allows one to deliver information at full speed of an optimized community network without limitation of lower speed global networks
  • There is an option to make generic and customized CD-Roms for particular businesses, school districts or classes
Example from Kids Web:
  • Selection of educational material from Internet
  • A particular automatic fetching algorithm (all information one-hop from NPAC list in KIds Web pages) took 12.5 hours
    • Visited 1329 hosts
    • Downloaded 8444 files
    • Took 151 Megabytes to store
  • Formally would take 8 seconds to deliver over OC3 ATM link
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 13 Total Information on the Internet

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Base this on extrapolation from Kids Web Caching Experiments
Compare with Encyclopedia Britannica === EB Below
4600 of registered WWW Servers. (Maybe half of all servers in existence)
Total Space about one terabyte = 1500 CDROM's
Text Space : 185 Million Pages or 685 times text in EB
Image Space: 5 Million Pictures or 317 times images in EB
Movie space : 280 hours of small MPEG compressed material ( not in EB)
Use of space in WWW servers:
20% text, 60% Images, 3% Video, 17% other or unclear
  • Note future WWW will be 95% to 99% Video Information
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Foil 14 Traffic on the World Wide Web

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
All of 1992 : 0.5 Million pages
January to March 1993: 5 Million pages
May 1,1994 : 10 Million pages
September 1,1994 : 50 Million pages
Current Increase is 1% per day
Unit is Page of Text or Equivalent (in Size)
Note One page is about a kilobyte
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 15 WWW Server Growth Statistics

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 16 KidsWeb Access Statistics

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Using Log files produced by Mosaic, you can estimate number of individuals accessing material
  • Remove local accesses and count each login as one unit (Mosaic logs each piece of information accessed -- this is 10-20 per login
  • Dec 15: 117 accesses
  • Dec 16: 240 accesses
  • Dec 17: 114 accesses
  • Dec 18: 83 accesses
  • Dec 19: 142 accesses
KIdsweb is over half of all NPAC WWW accesses
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Foil 17 Comments on Storage of Movies on HPCC WebServers

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
All the News and Sports Archives of Reuters correspond to about 25,000 hours of information
  • Would take about 25 terabytes of storage at VHS quality and about 10 times this for HDTV quality
Estimate similar storage needs for:
  • CNN archives
  • Total number (10,000) of possible interesting movies
Total storage about 100 terabytes today
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 18 InfoMall Features and Capabilities

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * Important Information in IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Focus Areas
Infrastructure
Application Testbeds
Technologies
Products
Services
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 19 Some InfoMall Services in Web Technology Area

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Partnership with Corporations including
    • Mentoring of Small Businesses
  • Access to facilities and expertise
  • Partnering in SBIR and NIST ATP proposals
Education and Training
  • Masters degree in "Computational Science for the Information Age"
  • Courses on "How to install and Configure Parallel Databases"
    • .............................etc.........
Consulting with Corporations who are worried about how to integrate
  • High Speed Networks
  • Large parallel Servers
  • Datamining of large databases
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Foil 20 InfoMall Application Testbeds in Education Arena

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
In general these testbeds provide demonstrations and development environments for InfoMall products and services
Three Related Education Experimental Projects
  • Living Textbook -- Prototype of K-12 Educational Environment of year 2000
  • Physics 105/106 -- Science for non-Scientists
    • Some course modules built around Multimedia Information Systems
  • Distance Learning -- Web Technology provides new (as interactive, hyperlinked and multimedia) approachs
    • Could offer training (over NYNET) to interested corporations in digital information technology
    • Developing WWW (Perl scripts) support for authoring educational material
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Foil 21 Motivation and Backdrop of Living Textbook Project

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Motivation: NII will evolve to link schools, homes, offices, hospitals, government agencies with high speed digital links supporting real-time video for interactive collaboration and data access
K-12 schools lack adequate technology infrastructure and currently there is little understanding if and how NII can be used in education
So far use of technology in education has had modest success
Internet provides exemplar of broad capabilities of NII
NYNET with its MPP servers provides prototype of NII technologies
Involve professionals in Newhouse School of Public Communication and Syracuse School of Education
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Foil 22 Overview of the Living Textbook Project

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
The Living Textbook is a New York State funded Initiative to create educational applications that exploit leading information technologies
InfoMall Living Textbook Educational Applications
  • Interactive Multimedia Geographic Information System -- Virtual Field Trip --
  • New York State The Interactive Journey
  • Video Information on Demand
  • Cached Internet Resources
  • Telecollaboration in the classroom
  • Realistic (HPCC) Simulations on demand
Living Textbook Information Technologies
  • Terabyte Databases
  • Parallel Supercomputers
  • Interactive Multimedia
  • High Speed Wide Area Networks
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 23 The Living Textbook Project Partners

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
The Project Team
  • Syracuse University School of Education
  • Columbia's Teachers College
  • NYNEX
  • NPAC
Upstate Project Schools
  • Fowler High School, Syracuse NY
  • Rome Free Academy, Rome NY
  • Whitesboro Middle School, Whitesboro NY
Downstate (New York City) Project Schools
  • PS126: The Ralph Bunch School
  • The Dalton School
  • School for the Physical City
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Foil 24 Outside Partners of the Living Textbook Project

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
askERIC Educational Database for teachers with consultation
The Discovery Channel -- Content Provider
Reflex I/O -- Customized computer graphics
Reuters News Service
Syracuse Language Systems -- Learn Foreign Languages on Demand
TravelVenture -- Interactive travel information on Demand
US Air Force Rome Laboratory -- InfoVision technologies
WorldView Corp : Interactive Client-Server Geographic Information System
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 25 New York State -- The Interactive Journey

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Interactive three dimensional multimedia tour of New York State
Required InfoVision technologies
  • Parallel Database technologies
  • MPP server for USGS / Landsat Map and Multimedia database and parallel rendering
  • Scalable Parallel Terrain Renderer choosing resolution so can deliver in realtime given network banwidth and host compute capability
    • Similar to JPL tours of Mars and California but less realistic and faster renderer
    • Porting JPL software to SP2 using MPI for high-end use
  • Delivery over ATM(Gigabit) network
Note such a GIS (Geographic Information System) is natural multimedia interface to any spatially labelled Information -- It is Spatial Mosaic
  • Obvious Utility in Real Estate, Travel and Yellow Page Applications
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Foil 26 Content of New York State -- The Interactive Journey

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Information on Demand Application of 3D interactive navigation over New York State terrain where teachers can add multimedia data
  • Images: New York State Department of Tourisim NYS Images
    • Onon. County Public Library African American Photo
    • Documentary
    • Local sources such as BOCES collection from Erie Canal
    • Museum
  • Video: Niagra Falls, Lake Placid, New York City and local sources such
    • as "The Salt Industry and the History of Liverpool"
  • Text: State and local Government Information
    • Historical (e.g. Revolutionary War) and Cultural Resources
    • (e.g. Women's Hall of Fame)
Business analogies include generalized digital Yellow Pages
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Foil 27 Video on Demand in Living Textbook

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Centralized Video Server at NPAC distributed over NYNET on demand to schools
Indexed by text database to on average about every 15 seconds of video news
Will explore speech recognition for further indexing
Initially tens, then hundred to thousands of hours of video at approximately one gigabyte per VHS quality MPEG compressed video
Setting up Maspar as compression engine to process realtime satellite feeds from CNN and Reuters with MPEG2 broadcast quality output
Use modified WWW (Mosaic) browser
Initial video sources will be:
  • Reuters News Video as Class Reference Material for Social Studies and Foreign Language instructional support
  • Discovery channel educational documentaries
  • Multimedia material produced by teachers and school children
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Foil 28 Cached Internet Resources in Living Textbook Project

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Datamine the WWW for resources relevant to K-12 Classroom
  • Kidsweb is our initial selection based on teaching experience over the summer
Local Storage at NPAC to support focused teacher selection of material and high performance delivery over NYNET
Selection by teacher teams provides high-value materials, efficiency in teacher preparation time and K-12 appropriate material
Support of WWW searchs with knoledge agents from variety of sources
Offer to produce CDROM's of selected material for sites with poor Internet access
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Foil 29 Curricula Opportunities Opened Up by the World Wide Web

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
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New Teaching Methodologies with Information presented with:
  • Multi Media is not necessarily the most important idea
  • Hyper linked (non sequential and World Wide) material is more important:
Used for first time in Physics 105 this semester in SETI module
  • SETI -- Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence -- will be basis of class projects in Phy 106 next semester.
  • New "Mind and Machines" and "PseudoScience and the Paranormal" Modules offered experimentally in Phy 106
  • Need caching locally and high speed local networks to support the 167 students in class
  • This hyperlinked material accounts for about 10% Phy 105, 20% Phy 106 and expect to increase if success continues
  • Major Physics department commitment -- 3 faculty developing the 3 modules
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 30 Encyclopedia Galactica or Hyperlinked Approach to Educational Material

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Several Research Applications including
  • Rome Laboratory project Exploration of the InfoMall Concept
  • Will use in NSF Sponsored course on High Performance Computing and in "roadmap" material for National High Performance Software Exchange WWW resource
    • Roadmap to High Performance Fortran well developed
    • Roadmap to applications in initial form and used in presentation to Institute for Defence Analysis on Dual-Use HPCC Applications
Several Interesting new Computer Science technologies are needed to support this. We are developing PERL based Mosaic Server enhancements to support authoring of hyperlinked material.
  • This will include use of knowledge agents (developed elsewhere) to aid world-wide linkage.
  • First application will be Personal Information system supplementing UNIX mh mail system
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Foil 31 Degrees courses offered over the NII (Internet)

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
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These hyperlinked Interactive Multimedia approachs to Distance Learning can be extended to offer Degrees, Certicates, Courses etc. to remote users
Each group of users would use their own focal Web server
  • For instance, continuing education for NYNET would use corporation-specific Web server linked to those of originating Universities
  • Use FLAG to link Web Server in NPAC to local servers at the FLAG off-ramps in Africa
    • Allow Syracuse to offer education and consulting on world-wide basis
    • FLAG too expensive for direct interactive video links to USA but can afford to download each video clip once and allow local access
  • Note would allow lower bandwidth interactive links to USA as part of instruction i.e. caching (data replication) is selective
Living Textbook is an example of this in K-12 Education
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Foil 32 NPAC -- SUNY Health Science Center Collaboration - I

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
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SUNY HSC is juxtaposed to Syracuse University Campus and hopefully NYNET will extend from NPAC to SUNY HSC
Initial Experiments demonstrated to Hillary Clinton and involved:
  • Telemedicine over ATM using commercial collaboration technologies
SUNY HSC responsible for large rural area including Adirondacks
Image Processing on MPP for Pathology Images using multi-resolution browsing techniques
  • Explore as cost effective enabling technology for wide spread pathology screening
SUNY HSC Carenet project led by Dr. Bob Corona emphasizes MPP use and NPAC Collaboration
  • Selected as major test site for HOST project
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Foil 33 NPAC -- SUNY Health Science Center Collaboration - II

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
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HOST is Healthcare Open Systems and Trials collaboration between Sprint DEC HP NASA etc. which won a $16M grant from NIST
  • SUNY HSC CareNet has been selected by HOST as their main test site
Recent NSF Workshop on "High Performance Computing and Communications in HealthCare" brought together roughly 20 researchers each from Computer Science and Medical Informatics
  • Report will be used by NSF in planning future research initiatives -- possibly in Collaboration with NLM(National Library of Medicine) and NIH
  • 4 Working groups covering databases (patient records) and Imaging (including robotics and telemedicine)
    • Fox led working Group on Database Structure and Searching (datamining)
Visible Human -- 14 Gigabyte database of "Adam" with better than 1 mm slices
  • Interesting for NYNET and Web Servers as Internet too slow for such a large database to be viewed interactively
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Foil 34 Overview of Some Expected Pervasive Early Digital Applications

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Use of Lower Speed Connections
  • Major Focus of Netscape and other commercial activities
  • ISDN -- optimize and understand use of this technology
  • Caching Web Servers important to provide access to popular sites and perhaps to allow installation of optimal performance delivery systems such as Video Stream technology under development at NPAC
Use of Carefully Planned High Speed Links
  • Linking Kiosks in high user density areas (Malls, Hotels, Airports, Government Buildings) to Webservers
  • VASTNET is an example of this generalizing OrangeSource kiosk system
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Foil 35 VASTNET -- NPAC, Newhouse School, University Electronic Media Services Collaboration

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
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Video and Server Technology Network is prototype of Wire Service of future using Web Technology to service Mass Communications Industry
NYNET ATM network extended internally to allow linkage of NPAC to Newhouse School of Public Communications and University Electronic Media Production Unit
Faculty and students -- the multimedia digital journalists of the future will use:
  • Archives stored on HPCC servers browsed at low (VHS) resolution but stored(delivered by wire server) at broadcast quality.
  • Browsing also using text interfaces (index to a clip of average length 15 seconds)
Study Integration digital editing (AVID) technology of media field with digital web and HPCC technology.
Industrial partners from traditional print and analog video fields
  • CNN and Reuters
  • Should try involve Syracuse Newspapers ?
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Foil 36 Government Information Systems
i.e. Digital Service Opportunities in Government arena

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
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Syracuse Community Information Network
  • Led by Onondaga County Library System
  • Need to kick start this project with bank of telephone lines including ISDN
Maxwell School Exploratorium uses Realtime Multimedia to support political and government decision making
  • Currently have no capability to store digital information and browse as we are developing in Living Textbook
  • Interesting plan to work with China to set up modern administrative structure
    • Can we link to FLAG or similar project?
Corporate Enterprise or Information Systems for external access -- More Examples needed!
  • Many similar issues to Government example
  • Retail, FIRE(Financial, Insurance,Real Estate) appear especially promising
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Foil 37 The Technical Structure of the World Wide Web -- Basic System

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * Critical Information in IMAGE
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The World Wide Web is a network of computers connected via the Internet and communicating with a protocol that supports hypermedia. Some of these computers are (Web)Servers that provide Information that can be displayed by Browsers
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Foil 38 The Technical Structure of the World Wide Web -- Components

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * Important Information in IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Browser is a user interface program for navigating and viewing Hypermedia. the Mailcap file determines which viewer may be used. There may also be interaction with other (Server) programs via the CGI.
The Internet transmits MIME (MultiPurpose Internet Mail Exchange) data from the server. The Server responds to URL sent with HTTP by the Browser. If the MIME data is not HTML, the Browser may invoke a separate viewer.
The Server is a program which responds to requests from Browsers for hypermedia. The URL supplied by the Browser determines if response is an HTML file or is to be generated by a CGI program.
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 39 The Hyperworld of New Interactive Media

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * Critical Information in IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Three Dimensions of Multimedia Extensions for Interactive Services
  • HPCC with high speed Fiber Optical connections and Superservers
  • Immersion with Spatial Navigation Metaphor
  • Multi-User Shared Distributed (Virtual) Worlds of Information and Simulation
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 40 Web Software Technologies and Standards I

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Clients
  • NCSA Mosaic and Commercial Versions
  • Netscape
  • Others include Gopher, Cello, Viola, and IBM / Microsoft browsers embedded in PC operating systems
Servers
  • The CERN Server was first but
  • The NCSA HTTP Server is small and optimized for high network load
  • Others include Plexus which is a PERL based Server
Protocols
  • URL -- Universal Resource Locator -- A uniform world-wide addressing mode for computing resources
  • HTTP -- Hypertext Transport Protocol -- A query script sent from browser to server which contains both the URL and a method which is currently GET or POST
  • HTML -- Hypertext Markup Language -- Hypermedia document description language which is sent from Server to Client
  • CGI -- Common Gateway Interface -- is a uniform mechanism to escape from Web Server to further programs on the server side
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 41 Web Software Technologies and Standards II

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Hypermedia Support
  • Fill-Out Forms is a native Interactive Graphical User INterface (GUI) in HTML using a subset of Motif capabilities.
  • ImageMaps are a native HTML interface to interactive (clickable) images
  • MIME -- Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension -- is a framework to implement media formats such as GIF and Postscript
Web Tools for Development and New Services
  • Perl Libraries
  • Web Search and Information retrieval by robots (Knowbots), Intelligent agents, Webwalkers and worms
  • Interfaces to relational database management systems including GSQL and DBPerl
  • World Wide Web Directories (of directories) with interactive links to services
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 42 Recent Developments in WWW Tools and Standards

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
PERL5 offers new object oriented structure extending original PERL which is a scripting language for manipulating operating system (UNIX) services.
VRML or Virtual Reality Modelling Language
  • VRML is based on SGI Inventor which is a 3D design and modelling script language where VRML has hyperlink extensions
  • VRML gives a uniform addressing and composition scheme for 3D graphics objects on the Internet
HTML+ and HTML/NCC
  • Netscape Communication Corp (NCC) offers custom HTML extensions in Netscape commercial browser
  • Internet community confused as HTML/NCC is "cool" but not compatible with official HTML+ extension efforts
W3 Organization formed at CERN in 1994
  • Organizes conferences such as those at Geneva in May 94 and Chicago in Oct 94
  • Enforces uniformity and consistency of public Internet standards
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 43 Industrial Activities Relevant to WWW Technologies

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Commercial Internet Activities
  • Web Browser support in Windows95 and OS/2 version 3.0
  • Rapidly growing number of businesses are on the net selling everything from Pizza to Software and Magazines/Books
Personal Digital Communicators have motivated important software systems such as:
  • Magic Cap and their Telescript which is agent based communication scripting language
  • Lotus Notes which is impressive Multi-User Information Exchange Tool
Open and Portable Document standards and Formats of importance include CORBA, OLE and ACROBAT
HELP! * GREY=local HTML version of LOCAL Foils prepared April 4,1995

Foil 44 Relationship between Current Commercial and World Wide Web Technologies

From Webserver General Description -- January 1995. * See also color IMAGE
Full HTML Index
Commercial communication and office automation technologies are in many ways far superior to those in WWW but:
The Web technologies are open and have the huge and expanding Internet/NII marketplace. Thus they will set standards and define services which existing and new commercial software and hardware must be consistent with
  • For instance current closed multimedia authoring systems such as Macromedia Director must be made Web ready
  • Persuasion (used in these foils) must allow one to access URL's for material to be placed in them
    • This will enable applications where pictures and designs are made using Internet material and posted on the Internet for further processing.
    • For instance one can design Wallpaper using Internet Images and then transmit to a computer controlled Wallpaper machine placed next to a FEDEX delivery service .....
  • As another example, we see Lotus Notes as potentially a very interesting WWW service development toolkit
Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

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Page produced by wwwfoil on Mon Feb 17 1997