Top Technology Trends

Tennant's Top Tech Trend Tidbit

Web 2.0
A suite of technologies is being swept under the broad label of “Web 2.0” to signify a “second generation” Web. These technologies include things like Web Services (e.g., Simple Object Access Protocol or SOAP, and Representational State Transfer or REST) and Ajax.

The point is that these technologies provide a way for information to be sucked out of multiple, separate, and distant systems and rendered in the user’s browser as a rich, highly interactive interface. Examples of Web 2.0 technologies at work is how various people have been combining their own data with Google Maps to create an entirely new service. For example, at ChicagoCrime.org, you can pick a particular crime and have the locations of those crimes mapped on a Google Map.

This all starts to hit home when you read a paper like the Talis White Paper: Project Silkworm, available at the Silkworm web site, or when you read about the JISC Framework effort, or the similar Digital Library Federation digital library framework effort (not yet public). Why, the Silkworm Project posits, should we not create an infrastructure that allows anyone, anywhere, to write a review of a book we own that can become immediately available to any other library that wants it? Why indeed.