S519: Evaluation of Information Systems

Introduction

What is an Information System?

A set of hardware, software, data, procedural, and human components that work together to generate, collect, store, retrieve, process, analyze, and/or distribute information.– William S. Davis (1994). Business systems analysis and design. Wadsworth: Belmont, CA

An integrated set of components for collecting, storing, processing, and communicating information – Britannica

A system of persons, data records and activities that process the data and information in an organization, and it includes the organization’s manual and automated processes. -- Wikipedia

Why IS?

IS - our daily life Business firms Organizations Schools Individuals

We rely on IS: Manage operations (process financial accounts) Compete in the marketplace (automate information processing) Supply services (governmental services to citizens) Augment personal lives (study, shop, bank and invest)

History

The first large-scale mechanized information system – Herman Hollerith’s census tabulator (to process the 1890 US Census)

History Left to right: The circuit-closing press ("card reader"); diagram of

press; hand insertion of card into a sorter compartment that opened automatically based on the values punched into the card; tallying the day's results. "Each completed circuit caused an electromagnet to advance a counting dial by one number. The tabulator's 40 dials allowed the answers to several questions to be counted simultaneously. At the end of the day, the total on each dial was recorded by hand and the dial set back to zero

History

UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) one of the first computers used for information

processing. Used to process US Census in 1951

History

Personal Computers (PC) Available to small business and individuals in

1970s Around 1Billion PC has been sold since mid-

1970s

History The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the

"Web") is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. - wikipedia

The Web was created around 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

As its inventor, Berners-Lee conceived the Web to be the Semantic Web where all its contents should be descriptively marked-up.

WWW: Basic Ideas

Hypertext/hyperlink: Resource Identifiers

unique identifiers used to locate a particular resource (computer file, document or other resource) on the network

URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)/URL (Uniform Resource Locator): http or ftp http://somehost/absolute/URI/with/absolute/path/to/

resource.txt ftp://somehost/resource.txt

Markup language: characters or codes embedded in text which indicate

structure, semantic meaning, or advice on presentation

WWW – Web 1.0

The current (syntactic / structural) Web

Was the Web meant to be more?

Social Web – Web 2.0 The term Web 2.0 was made popular by Tim O’Reilly:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 “Web 2.0 … has … come to refer to what some people describe

as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web.”

The Web where “ordinary” users can meet, collaborate, and share using social software applications on the Web (tagged content, social bookmarking, AJAX, etc.)

Popular examples include: Bebo, del.icio.us, digg, Flickr, Google Maps, Skype, Technorati,

orkut, 43 Things, Wikipedia…

YouTube

Features / principles of Web 2.0

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

1. The Web as platform

2. Harnessing collective intelligence

3. Data is the next “Intel Inside”

4. End of the software release cycle

5. Lightweight programming models

6. Software above the level of a single device

7. Rich user experiences

Linked Open Data

From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0

Web 1.0Web 1.0 Web 2.0Web 2.0 Web 3.0Web 3.0

Personal Websites Blogs Semantic Blogs: semiBlog, Haystack, Semblog, Structured Blogging

Content Management Systems, Britannica Online

Wikis, Wikipedia Semantic Wikis: Semantic MediaWiki, SemperWiki, Platypus, dbpedia, Rhizome

Altavista, Google Google Personalised, DumbFind, Hakia

Semantic Search: SWSE, Swoogle, Intellidimension

CiteSeer, Project Gutenberg

Google Scholar, Book Search

Semantic Digital Libraries: JeromeDL, BRICKS, Longwell

Message Boards Community Portals Semantic Forums and Community Portals: SIOC, OpenLink DataSpaces

Buddy Lists, Address Books

Online Social Networks

Semantic Social Networks: FOAF, PeopleAggregator

… … Semantic Social Information Spaces: Nepomuk, Gnowsis