Collaborative Sharing of Information

2.5.1 Introduction

In this section we present current state-of-art on collaborative sharing of information. Hence in Section 2.5.2 we provide definition of collaborative sharing of information paradigm, known as Web 2.0 paradigm and in Section 2.5.3, we enumerate different types of Web 2.0 services. As this thesis objective is related to collaborative sharing of QoS-information, in Section 2.5.4, we give its current state of the art.

2.5.2 Web 2.0 Definition

Collaborative sharing of information by a group of users (of a web-service), has gained increasing users’ acceptance in different domains as indicated by (Hoegg, Martignoni et al. 2006). Facebook (Facebook 2007) and Wikipedia (Anonymous 2006)are successful examples of thee. This paradigm has been defined as Web 2.0 firstly by (O'Reilly 2005), as follows.

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Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all collected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform:

delivering software as a continually updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an architecture of participation, and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

This definition has been further redefined by others, for example (Hoegg, Martignoni et al. 2006) define Web 2.0 as follows.

Web 2.0 is a paradigm for mutually maximizing collective knowledge and added-value for each participant (in a community) by formalized and dynamic sharing and creation of user-generated content.

Web 2.0 service users are such ‘participants’ (also called ‘prosumers’

(Tapscott and Williams 2006)) contributing to the community with the information they create. (Aigrain 2003) emphasize that user participation is a base for the model of Web 2.0 service, where a user-generated content is the most common form of participation. Users create, link and evaluate content. They create a pool of knowledge in a collaborative manner. A user benefit from the participation in the Web 2.0 community comes from an extrinsic value of the exchanged content and knowledge. The role of a Web 2.0 service provider is to provide an open Internet standards-based technology framework that facilitates content and knowledge exchange by users. This framework is guarded by a set of formalized guidelines (e.g.

content versioning). Moreover, a provider can have additional services like rating, annotations and information enrichment.

(Martignoni and Stanoevska-Slabeva 2007) emphasize the characteristics of web 2.0 business models like a) simple value chains including service provider and its users; and b) low costs of offering the content to users. The generated content is relevant to the users; hence they are willing to invest time and resources to contribute. The revenues for service providers are so far generated mainly from advertisements.

2.5.3 Web 2.0 Service Types

With the emergence of mobile technologies, many fixed-Internet based Web 2.0 services become accessible to the user ‘on the move’. This paradigm is called Mobile Web 2.0.

Mobile Web 2.0 is a Web 2.0 paradigm which services are implemented with use of mobile services.

Definition 12 Web 2.0 (O'Reilly 2005)

Definition 13 Web 2.0 (Hoegg, Martignoni et al. 2006)

Definition 14 Mobile Web 2.0 (Hoegg, Martignoni et al. 2006)

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Mobile Web 2.0 can be realized via a mobile extension of the existing Web 2.0 services. This type of services we call mobile-enabled web 2.0 services (Hoegg, Martignoni et al. 2006). In contrast, there is increasing number of new Web 2.0 services dedicated for mobile use only. These are called standalone mobile web 2.0 services. These are, for example Handy Clipfish (comparable to a mobile YouTube) and SeeMeTV (mobile TV) by 3UK (3UK 2008).

They consider the following types of Web 2.0 from the perspective of the exchanged content:

1. blogs;

2. wikis;

3. podcasts;

4. social networks;

5. social bookmarks or folksonomies;

6. services that allow automatic content manipulation and updates;

7. trust building services, e.g. rating, voting;

8. platform/tools for e.g. making a new community;

9. online collaboration tools (e.g. workflow visualization);

10. community services (e.g. find new friends).

From the perspective of users, (Facebook 2007) consider Web 2.0 services targeting

a. communities, like social networking (dating or business), knowledge sharing (search engine) and interest groups (e.g. charity);

b. platform tools, empowering the user, like directory (e.g. technocrati) or technology-centric tools e.g. wiki;

c. online collaboration services for a closed user group with a specific objective, like online application tools (e.g. iRows – Microsoft Excel application online) or virtual workflow modelling for a brainstorming.

Particularly many Web 2.0 services aim to facilitate of building a social networks by its users.

A social network is a social structure made of nodes, in which individuals are tied by specific relations such as financial exchange or friendship.

Prominent successful Web 2.0 services for social networking are Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 or LinkedIn.

There exist a number of proposals for different uses of Web 2.0 paradigm. For example, (Boll 2007) proposes the use of Web 2.0 services for collaborative multimedia content analysis, with a semantic content classification and annotation and structured media authoring. They claim that Web 2.0 can bring to multimedia the following: user-based media tagging, simplicity, falksonomy (i.e., jargon) analysis, i.e., distinguishing

Definition 15

Social Network (Yang, Kim et al. 2007)

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between tags originating from exact ontologies and from user’s language.

Users could collaboratively work on video content classification, its segmentation; grouping of multimedia at the content level, not just by keywords as it is done so far. (Pawar, Subercaze et al. 2008) propose the use of Web 2.0 services to build a platform for mobile virtual communities, supporting context-aware social interaction for mutual offering of personalized services. As a base, they propose a context-aware matchmaking function.

2.5.4 Collaborative Sharing of QoS-information

There exist a limited number of proposals for the implementation of the Web 2.0 paradigm in the domain of QoS management. Namely (Jurca, Binder et al. 2007) aim that service users collaboratively share QoS-information and they would be financially rewarded if their QoS-information is correct. Namely, the authors propose that QoS-information would be used for other users of services in real-time. That means if a user wants to select a service, he would select it based on the real-time QoS-information provided by others. (Laforenza, Nardini et al. 2008) proposes sharing of user’s QoS-information to support services’ delivery with the use of grid computing infrastructures. They propose a Service Provider Ranker - a tool that retrieves service provider information and ratings provided by its previous users. (Kong, Rezaei et al. 2006) (Amit and Zott 2001) propose collaborative information sharing by users tagging spam email, in order to build a reliable spam filter.

There exist also a number of initiatives, which aim at collaborative information sharing by users of fixed-Internet service providers (ISPs). For example, there exist a user-generated ranking of worldwide ISPs and their provided services (www.thelist.com). Similarly, for the French market, a list of ISPs is generated (www.grenouille.com) based on RTT /data rates measurements executed by ISP users every 30 minutes.

For wireless-access Internet providers, there is a limited number of initiatives. In www.mobielinternetkwaliteit.nl (in the Netherlands), a mobile user installs on his mobile device software that automatically performs uplink/downlink data rate measurements for GPRS/UMTS networks. Similarly, in Germany www.speedtracks.org, software installed on user mobile device automatically performs a delay /data rates measurements for networks used by a user. In both cases, the results are visible on the website and can be used by other users. WLAN-war-driving (www.wardrive.net) is a website that gathers WLAN-users to exchange information about WLAN available in their location. Other communities like www.fon.com or www.accesspointlive.com assists WLAN providers, to advertise their WLAN free of charge availability to others.

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