There are two versions of the Internet Technologies course at LMU:
If you are taking the undergraduate version of this course, your course is concerned with the intersection of three topics:
If you are taking the graduate version of this course, we will do less multimedia and cover networking, protocols, Internet/Web standards, and web applications in more detail.
A very official sounding, long, and detailed definition of Computer Science is available from CSAB, but in a nutshell computer science is the study of computation: how we can encode and process information. There is a particular concern with information processing that is efficient and useful, meaning computer scientists have to become adept at formulating the "best" abstractions for the real-world problems they have to model and solve.
Perhaps it is best to view computer science in terms of its relationship to the two other meta-disciplines. Meta-disciplines are those in which knowledge and information are studied, not just used to study other things.
A good definition of Multimedia is by Antti Peltonen, who writes:
The term multimedia refers broadly to information in different formats: text, still images, sound, music, video and animation. Acording to some definitions, multimedia describes an integrated presentation which combines at least three of those elements in a single integrated delivery system.
...Multimedia is just a way to deliver the message. If there is no message, all you can do with multimedia is [create] a nice package for nothing.
In general, by using multimedia in your applications you can produce applications that are:
- Efficient: you can replace information you read with information you can see and hear, such as a video clip.
- Direct: you can deliver information using the best medium, such as a language-teaching application that plays a native speaker's voice to demonstrate pronunciation.
- Interactive: It is easier to construct genuine and multilevel user interaction with pictures and sounds than with plain text only.
The Internet Society gives this defintion:
The Internet is a global network of networks enabling computers of all kinds to directly and transparently communicate and share services throughout much of the world. Because the Internet is an enormously valuable, enabling capability for so many people and organizations, it also constitutes a shared global resource of information, knowledge, and means of collaboration, and cooperation among countless diverse communities.
A more technical definition is that an internet (small "i") is any network of network that communicates via a protocol called IP, and that the Internet (big "I") is the largest of all internets: you know it when you see it.
The World Wide Web is the most useful way to use the resources on the Internet. Prior to the web, Internet users would use FTP, gopher, archie, WAIS, telnet, news, email, and a variety of other custom-designed applications to use Internet resources. The web started off as "just another Internet application" but then someone realized that web browsers could be made to easily render just about any resource on the Internet.
The undergraduate course will tend to focus on how the web is used to package and present multimedia content. We will clearly emphasize the technical aspects of web-related technologies (particularly the many that revolve around XML), though we will also emphasize how to ensure that web-based multimedia presentations are efficient, accessible, and easy-to-use. We will not cover the details of how one uses tools to make images, sound files, or movies, as these are covered in the other five courses (Computer Graphics, Digital Toolbox, Multimedia Authoring, Multimedia Design, Multimedia Production). We will also not cover low-level internet protocols.
In the undergraduate course, we will be mostly be concerned with the following questions and topics:
In order for the Web to be an effective vehicle for efficient, useful, usable, attractive, and economical data exchange, it must be built around technology that
XML is the one technology that satisifies all the requirements above. Sure, it has been hyped beyond belief, but seems the best answer for the present.
XML is a markup language. It is also a meta language in which you can define other markup languages. Markup is so right for the web for so many reasons. XML appears to be the right markup language: in fact XML was created because an earlier markup meta-language, SGML, had too many problems.
XML and related technologies will comprise a large part of this course.
A rough outline of the course is