TUTORIALS

TA1 – Introduction to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Graphics on the Web until recently was raster graphics images (GIF, PNG, JPEG etc) which suffer from a number of limitations (large size, inability to zoom without losing detail, binary format, no inherent hyperlinking etc). Non-proprietary vector graphics is now possible using W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a standard with many implementations available.

Tutorial attendees will receive a thorough introduction to SVG and will be able to construct reasonably complex diagrams by the end of the tutorial. They will also gain an appreciation of where SVG stands in relationship to other W3C standards.

The tutorial will:

• Introduce the coordinates and rendering model of SVG
• Explain the Graphics Primitives, their Attributes and properties
• Discuss the Grouping,Transformation and Composition facilities including Clipping and Masking
• Show how SVG can be used in Practice
• Review Implementations and Tools
• Put SVG 1.0 in the context of SVG 1.2, SVG Tiny, SVG Basic and the future

The tutorial will assume that participants are acquainted with the basic concepts of markup languages and styling. A detailed background in computer graphics is not necessary.

Participants at the tutorial will have received the appropriate background needed to attend the follow-on tutorial TP2: Filtering, Scripting and Animation in SVG.

Presenters:

David Duce is Professor in Computing at Oxford Brookes University. He has been involved in the development of standards for computer graphics for 20 years, starting with the Graphical Kernel System (GKS). Together with Bob Hopgood and Vincent Quint, he submitted a proposal to W3C entitled Web Schematics, which launched the SVG activity. He has participated in the development of SVG 1.0 and represents Oxford Brookes University on the Advisory Committee of W3C. His research interests include web graphics and mulitiservice systems.

Zaineb ben Fredj is a researcher at Oxford Brookes in the area of high-level diagram description for the Web. By capturing the structure and semantics of a diagram, the aim is to generate accessible and appropriate presentations dependent on both the user and hardware requirements. She uses SVG as the output format for her research.

Bob Hopgood is a visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University. Prior to that he worked at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and W3C. He was active in establishing a Web Profile for the Computer Graphics Metafile. He also established W3C's Offices in Europe, Morocco, Australia and Israel. He has nearly 40 years of experience in computer graphics, especially in standardisation activities and has lectured internationally on emerging web standards. He was Programme Chair for WWW5 in Paris.

David Duce and Bob Hopgood gave a half-day tutorial on SVG at WWW2002 in Hawaii and have given SVG Tutorials at Eurographics 2001 and CGI2002. The three presenters have given 1-day hands-on SVG Tutorials in the UK and lecture on the Web Technologies MSc at Oxford Brookes.

Tutorial Web Site

TA2 – Web Engineering: A Holistic Approach to Successful Web Application Development (first part)

Web-based systems now play increasingly important roles in many applications. As we now rely heavily on them, there is growing need for higher quality, better performance and continuous availability of these systems. But most Web-based systems are still poorly developed in an ad hoc manner and on piece meal basis. Hence, they perform poorly, do not scale up and are prone to failures.

Web engineering is a proactive approach that addresses these concerns and offers systematic approaches and disciplined processes for development of large, complex Web-based systems and applications.

This tutorial will:

• Highlight the problems, complexity and challenges of the multidisciplinary nature of Web application development
• Discuss the commonalties and differences between software development and Web development
• Offer a holistic approach to development of Web applications
• Present suitable methodologies and processes that Web developers could follow for successful development
• Address the issues of maintainability, usability, scalability, configuration management and other non-technical aspects
• Recommend suitable Web quality assurance and Web audit procedures
• Discuss Web project management

The tutorial will be useful to professionals and practitioners in industry interested in developing, maintaining, and using advanced Web-systems and applications, researchers, students and project managers.

Presenters:

San Murugesan is professor of information technology in the School of Multimedia and Information Technology at Southern Cross University, Australia. He is a co-guest editor of the special issues of IEEE Multimedia on Web Engineering, Part 1 and 2 (Jan 2001 and April 2001) and a co-editor of the book, Web Engineering Managing the Diversity and Complexity of Web Application Development, (Hot Topic Series, Springer Verlag, 2001).

Yogesh Deshpande is a senior lecturer at the School of Computing and Information Technology and a founding member of the Web-based Information Systems and Methodologies (WebISM) Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. Yogesh’s research interest include Web engineering and design, information systems, end user computing, and simulation modelling.

TA3 – SMIL 2.0 -- Interactive Multimedia on the Web

SMIL 2.0 specifies interactive multimedia on the Web. It has been a W3C recommendation since August 2001. It already enjoys substantial support, implemented in such Web browsers as RealNetworks' RealOne/Helix and Internet Explorer 6. This version of SMIL extends SMIL 1.0, a W3C recommendation since June 1998. SMIL 2.0 is 15 times as large as SMIL 1.0, and defines a family of languages rather than just one language. This tutorial presents SMIL 2.0, tools for it, how to create presentations in it, and how it has currently been adopted by the community at large.

This tutorial covers SMIL 2.0 as a specification, the sub-languages it defines, the available tools for it, and its current use on the Web. The primary constructs are described in full. All areas of SMIL 2.0 are overviewed. All languages defined with SMIL constructs, including SMIL 1.0, SMIL 2.0 Language Profile, SMIL 2.0 Basic Language Profile (SMIL Basic), XHTML+SMIL and SVG, are discussed. Available tools for playing and editing these languages are presented and demonstrated. Examples of SMIL 2.0 presentation in current use are demonstrated.

The goal of the tutorial is to explain the concepts that form the basis of the SMIL language and to provide sufficient detail on the language itself so that participants can create their own simple presentations. Participants will also understand the underlying issues of temporal and spatial layout and the complexity of creating links within multimedia. They will also be able to use available tools to play and create SMIL presentations.

Presenter

Dr. Lloyd Rutledge is a researcher at CWI. His research involves adaptive and generated hypermedia, and standards for it such as SMIL. He was a member of the W3C working group that developed SMIL. He also helped develop the GRiNS authoring and playback environment for SMIL. He is co-author, with Dick C.A. Bulterman of Oratrix, of SMIL 2.0 -- Multimedia on the Web, to be published soon by Pearson Education.

Tutorial web site

TA4 – Adaptive Web-based Systems: Technologies and Examples

Web systems suffer from an inability to satisfy heterogeneous needs of many users. A Web course presents the same static explanation of a concept to students with widely differing knowledge of the subject. A Web bookstore offers the same selection of bestsellers to customers with different reading preferences. A Web museum offers the same "guided tour" and the same narration to visitors with very different goals and interests. A remedy for the negative effects of the traditional "one-size-fits-all'' approach is to develop systems with an ability to adapt their behavior to the goals, tasks, interests, and other features of individual users and groups of users. Adaptive Web is a relatively young research area. Started in with a few pioneering works on adaptive hypertext in early 1990, it now attracts many researchers from different communities such as hypertext, user modeling, machine learning, natural language generation, information retrieval, intelligent tutoring systems, cognitive science, and Web-based education. Currently, the principal application areas of adaptive Web systems are education, information retrieval, e-commerce, and kiosk-style information systems. Most recent systems are exploring new promising application areas such as medicine and tourism.

The goal of the tutorial is to present a comprehensive introduction into adaptive Web- systems for "Web-oriented" audience. It will provide an introduction to the field of adaptive Web, a detailed description of several efficient but easy-to-implement adaptation techniques, several examples of adaptive Web systems in different application areas, and a summary of several experimental studies of adaptive Web systems.

The tutorial will be useful for researchers in the area of advanced Web systems as well as for practitioners who can benefit from making their Web systems adaptive. It is an update of a popular tutorial presented at WebNet'2000 and WebNet 2001 conferences.

Presenter:

Peter Brusilovsky is a faculty at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1987 from the Moscow State University. He hold visiting appointments at Sussex University (UK), Tokyo Denki University (Japan), University of Trier (Germany), Free University of Bolzano (Italy), and Carnegie Mellon University (USA). Peter's main research interests are Adaptive Hypermedia Systems, Adaptive Web, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Student and User Modeling, and Navigation Support in Virtual Environments. He is an author of about 100 papers and an editor of several hypermedia-related books. He has also edited four special journal issues on adaptive hypermedia and adaptive Web systems, including recent special issue of Communications of the ACM.

TA5 – Web Services: Soup to Nuts

If you have heard of Web services and want to learn more about the architecture and technologies it uses, this talk is for you. We will present SOAP, the XML-based messaging protocol that provides generic access to programmable objects via the Internet. WSDL, the Web Services Description Language, provides all of the technical details for interfacing to the service in XML, to make it possible for application assembly tools on any platform can use them. UDDI is a global electronic "yellow pages" on the Internet which can be used to locate the services you need.

After covering the basis of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, we will have a look at the other major technologies that have been proposed for the Web services architecture. Security is vital for e-business usages of Web services, and we'll discuss digital signatures, encryption, authorization, and others. We will study a workflow and composition language, based on IBM's WSFL or Microsoft's Xlang, or a merging of these two. HTTPR is a proposal for simple changes to HTTP to provide reliable, one-time delivery of SOAP messages. All of the newest technologies will be presented with the latest, up-to-date information.

The discussion will be at the architectural level, and will be broad-based enough to bring you up to speed on all of the important technologies. We will also present a variety of free resources, both software and technical articles, to help you get started.

Presenter:

Heather Kreger is a senior technical staff member and Web services lead architect in the Emerging Technologies group of the IBM Software Group. She authored the white paper, "Web Services Conceptual Architecture." She is the Co-lead for JSR109: Implementing Web Services In the Enterprise, which defines how Web services will be deployed in J2EE environments being led by IBM. Heather has authored several articles on Web services and the management of Web services in the IBM Systems Journal in 2001. She is currently IBM's representative to the W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group and the OASIS Web Services Management Protocol Technical Committee.

TP1 – Filtering, Scripting and Animation in SVG

This tutorial is either a follow-on tutorial to the tutorial TA1: Introduction to SVG or aimed at attendees who have a basic understanding of SVG and want more knowledge of the advanced features.

Scalable Vector Graphics is both a straightforward 2D vector graphics system for the Web and a powerful interactive and animation facility with sophisticated rendering effects.

Tutorial attendees will receive a thorough grounding in the more challenging features of SVG.

The tutorial will:

• Describe the filter effects that can be applied to the vector graphics image created by SVG
• Describe the animation facilities available in SVG
• Show how scripting can be used to provide a rich interaction environment
• Explain how SVG can be used with other W3C standards such as XHTML, XML, SMIL etc

For the tutorial, an acquaintance with the basic primitives and attributes of SVG and the composition facilities will be assumed. Attendance at the tutorial TA1: Introduction to SVG will provide an appropriate background.

Presenters:

David Duce is Professor in Computing at Oxford Brookes University. He has been involved in the development of standards for computer graphics for 20 years, starting with the Graphical Kernel System (GKS). Together with Bob Hopgood and Vincent Quint, he submitted a proposal to W3C entitled Web Schematics, which launched the SVG activity. He has participated in the development of SVG and represents Oxford Brookes University on the Advisory Committee of W3C. His research interests include web graphics and mulitiservice systems.

Zaineb ben Fredj is a researcher at Oxford Brookes in the area of high-level diagram description for the Web. By capturing the structure and semantics of a diagram, the aim is to generate accessible and appropriate presentations dependent on both the user and hardware requirements. She uses SVG as the output format for her research.

Bob Hopgood is a visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University. He has nearly 40 years of experience in computer graphics, especially in standardisation activities and has lectured internationally on emerging web standards. He was Programme Chair for WWW5 in Paris. He was an early pioneer in the area of computer animation in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

David Duce and Bob Hopgood gave a half-day tutorial on SVG at WWW2002 in Hawaii and have given SVG Tutorials at Eurographics 2001 and CGI2002. The three presenters have given 1-day hands-on SVG Tutorials in the UK and lecture on the Web Technologies MSc at Oxford Brookes.

Tutorial Web Site

TP2 – Web Engineering: A Holistic Approach to Successful Web Application Development (second part)

This tutorial is the second part of TA2 – Web Engineering: A Holistic Approach to Successful Web Application Development

TP3 – Rendering Faithfully with XSL Formatting Objects

XSL Formatting Objects (FO) provide high quality print presentation from XML. It provides means to produce a transaction record as PDF, for example, from SQL query results encoded in XML. This tutorial provides a fast, fun introduction to the uses and benefits of FO. It will quickly get you started producing documents using this relatively new W3C Recommendation.

Presenter:

Douglas Lovell is a software engineer with IBM Research Division. He has authored the "XSL Formatting Objects Developer's Handbook" published by Sams and written a partial implementation of FO for IBM. Doug lives in the Mid-Hudson Valley north of New York City in the USA. He is an active member of the International Aerobatics Club.

TP4 – Benchmarking of locally and geographically distributed Web-server systems

The need to optimize the performance of Web-based services is producing a variety of novel architectures for high performance and scalable servers and networks. This tutorial identifies the main issues associated with the performance analysis of locally and geographically distributed systems used for the deployment of highly accessed Web sites, and covers methodologies, tools, and techniques that can be used for evaluating their performance and scalability. The focus is on the design, tuning, and testing of distributed architectures (considering horizontal as well as vertical distribution of system components), where the performance evaluation is obtained through workload generators and analyzers in a controllable environment.

The tutorial identifies the qualities and issues of popular existing benchmarking tools with respect to their main features (workload characterization, content mapping on servers, traffic generation, data collection, output analysis and report), and discusses their applicability to the performance analysis of distributed Web-server systems. It also analyzes some characteristics that should be taken into consideration in the design of future benchmarking tools devoted to distributed Web systems. Case studies related to LAN and WAN-emulated systems will be presented.

The tutorial will be helpful to researchers involved in the design and performance evaluation of distributed Web systems as well as to practitioners that need to build a benchmarking environment for scalable high-performance Web systems.

Tutorial web site

Presenters:

Michele Colajanni is a Full Professor in the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Modena, Italy. His research interests include high performance computing, parallel and distributed systems, Web systems and infrastructures, load balancing, workload and performance analysis, and simulation.

Mauro Andreolini is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in computer engineering at the University of Roma "Tor Vergata", Italy. His research interests focus on the areas of computer networks, operating systems, design and benchmarking of Web systems and distributed servers.

Valeria Cardellini is a research associate at University of Roma "Tor Vergata". Her research interests include performance analysis, modeling and simulation of distributed systems and applications with particular emphasis on the World Wide Web and distributed servers.

TP5 – Merging Grid and Web technologies: where do we go?

Scope: Grid computing is an emerging technology that enables large-scale resource sharing and coordinated problem solving within distributed "virtual organizations". Originally, Grid technology was proposed to enable scientific collaborations to share resources on an unprecedented scale. Combining Grid technologies and Web Services open a new horizon for business applications, too. The tutorial is intended to provide an overview of Web and Grid Services, which are now providing technologies for distributed e-Business and e-Science applications.

Abstract: The tutorial will explain the main trends of Grid technologies and their recent combination with Web Services. After summarizing the most important features of the Grid and Web Services, we provide a unified view of the merge of the two technologies as a new vehicle for future Web applications.

We cover key Grid architectures as Globus, Condor-G and key Web Service architectures as XML, SOAP, WSDL, WSIL, UDDI. As a unified view the OGSA (Open Grid Service Architecture) is discussed.

Presenters:

Peter Kacsuk is the Head of the Laboratory of the Parallel and Distributed Systems in the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is a part-time full professor at the University of Westminster, Eotvos Lorand Science University of Budapest and University of Miskolc. He served as visiting scientist or professor several times at various universities of Austria, England, Germany, Spain, Australia and Japan. He has been published two books, two lecture notes and more than 130 scientific papers on parallel logic programming, parallel computer architectures, parallel software engineering, cluster and Grid tools.

Ferenc Vajda is a research advisor at the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a habilitated professor at the Faculty of Electronic Engineering and Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. . He has published seven text-books and technical books and more than hundred papers in periodicals and conference proceedings. He is the holder of 28 patents.

TF1 - Getting into RDF and the Semantic Web using N3

Objectives of tutorial are to understand coding data in RDF, writing and publishing vocabularies, and merging, filtering and querying RDF-based data using one experimental example system.

The world of the semantic web, as based on RDF, is really simple at the base. This tutorial shows you how to get started. It uses a simplified teaching language -- Notation 3 or N3 -- which is basically equivalent to RDF in its XML syntax, but easier to scribble when getting started.

It introduces an extension of N3 to become a language for rules and query. By running though some examples with a simple rule engine, it should give a feel for what is possible with semantic web data. It should include a simplified example of building a secure system based on a combination of logic and digital signature.

The tutorial is based on the Primer which has met with a certain success.
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer.html

Presenters:

Tim Berners-Lee will open the tutorial, Dan Connolly will present most of the material.

Dan Connolly serves on the Technical Architecture Group and the Web Ontology Working Group. He manages to find a little time for Semantic Web Development. He began contributing to the World Wide Web project, and in particular, the HTML specification, while developing hypertext production and delivery software in 1992. He presented a draft of HTML 2.0 at the first Web Conference in 1994 in Geneva, and served as editor until it became a Proposed Standard RFC in November 1995. He was the chair of the W3C Working Group that produced HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0, and collaborated with Jon Bosak to form the W3C XML Working Group and produce the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in late 1990 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client (a browser-editor running under NeXTStep) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs, HTTP and HTML. Tim is now the overall Director of the W3C. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.

Sandro Hawke is the Lead Semantic Web Developer at the W3C and holds a Research Scientist appointment at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. His recent work includes developing translators between different Semantic Web Knowledge Representation languages. Prior to coming to W3C he developed experimental global-scale information systems at the non-profit Information Roads Foundation. He has also worked as a contract website developer and as a teacher.