Unit-1

We will use Blackboard email function for this class. Make sure you update the current email addresses in Blackboard.

Butler, Declan (2006). The web-wide world. Nature, 439(16). February 2006, pp. 776-778. (Blackboard --> "Course documents").

Network technology evolved from local area networks (LAN) to wide area networks (WAN) to the Internet (Inter-networking) (Sloman, 1994).

The icons of network are usually represented in "clouds" in network graphs. Recently, the term, "cloud computing", has been adopted for network-based computing technology.

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Cloud computing is Internet ("cloud") based development and use of computer technology ("computing")[1][2][3]. It is a business information management style of computing in which typically real-time scalable [4] resources are provided “as a service”[5] over the Internet [6] to users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure ("in the cloud") that supports them[7].

It is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. An often-quoted example is Google Apps, which provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on Google servers.

The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet, based on how it is depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.[8]

The progenitor of the modern Internet was a network called ARPANET (http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/historical.html), set up in the 1970s by the U.S. Defense Department, developing a self-adjustable, decentralized networking system. The original goal of the ARPANET project was to provide a reliable telecommunications network which would persist after nuclear war. In 1983, the ARPANET project adopted the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as the standardized protocol for communications across interconnected networks, between computers with diverse hardware architectures, and between various operating systems. The dramatic success of the Internet and the popular adoption of TCP/IP pushed network development into a new age. Along with the rapid development of the Internet, many applications and programs have been developed, such as Newsgroup, Gopher, Bulletin Board System (BBS), Telnet, etc. The following figure illustrates the screen shot of the Gopher information Client via the Telnet application, which was one of the most popular Internet applications before the World Wild Wed.

Another milestone in the history of the Internet is the NSFNET backbone, which replace the ARPANET and provided a preliminary global network architecture for today's information superhighway. In 1985, the National Science Foundation (NSF) added five supercomputer centers (NSFNET) to the Internet and create the NSFNET backbone. Later on, NSF began an effort to privatize the backbone functions and the NSFNET backbone was replaced by a commercial Internet backbone. At the same time, the NSF implemented a new backbone architecture called very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), which serves as a testing ground for the next generation of Internet technologies.

	Real time information
	Easy to update
	Multimedia presentation
	Easy to access (no need for GIS software)
	......

CISCO On-line Document: Internetworking Technology Overview http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/ito_doc/index.htm

Cloud computing (cited from wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing (Jan28, 2009)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Theories and technologies behind the Internet mapping facilities and Web GIS.
	Hands-on skills for Web-authoring and Internet Map Servers.
	The design principles of on-line mapping and Multimedia Cartography.