Università Roma Tre

The network infrastructure. Transmission of information. Circuit-switched and packet-switched networks. Local networks. Topologies for local area networks. LANs interconnection. Software architecture for the network. Principles of operation of the TCP/IP. IP addressing, dotted decimal notation, netmask, gateway, DNS. Name authorities. (Chapter 5 of [1])

Network applications. Client/server Architectures. DBMS relational model. Differences between databases and data warehouses. HTTP Protocol: visualisation, http queries, http document specification, URI specification, HTML Language, the browser as a language interpreter; Definition of service proxy. Structuring of information in view of automatic processing. (Chapter 8 of [1]). The case of the processing and analysis of cultural information. Example: Lev Manovich [2] and examples of applications [3] and [4].

Search engines. Ranking algorithms: the mathematics underlying search engine. Browsing the Web and probability. Transition matrices and their eigenvalues. Interpretation of the principal eigenvector as a ranking measure (notes in [5]). Ranking algorithms, search engines and interfaces. Advanced Google queries [6].

Structuring information. Introduction to the XML tagging language. XML syntax; Definition of a grammar using regular expressions. Definition of the DTD (Data Type Definition). XSLT language for XML. Complete description of a specific DTD. Validation of XML documents against a DTD. Using XSLT for XHTML documents from XML. RSS specification. ([7])

Wikipedia as an example of information infrastructure. User interface: editing of articles in Wikipedia. Dynamic web server; Open Source Software; Description of the LAMP architecture. Analysis and application of XML for the management of information.

[1] AA.VV., Fondamenti di Informatica 2 ISBN: 9788808044372 (2004).
[2] Lev Manovich, Cultural Analytics, Software Studies Initiative (2009).
[3] Lisa Jevbratt, 1 to 1: internet visualisation
[4] Stefanie Posavec, Literary Spaces
[5] Lecture Notes of MIT Course on Page Ranking.
[6] Advanced Operators Reference (Google Guide):
[7] Luca Roversi, Gestione Strutturata dell'Informazione.