The iClone Extension: A P2PU School of Webcraft Project
I will be wrapping up my extension development class in a week or two at the P2PU School of Webcraft; and I am pleased to tell you about one of the projects my students have been working on. The student is Apostolis Mastoris, an undergraduate student in the Department Computer Engineering & Informatics, University of Patras, Greece, and the project is called iClone. iClone is a research on social navigation, which is gaining lots of attention. The work relates to collaborative search. Collaborative search aims at facilitating collaboration of small groups on performing search tasks, such as students working together on assignments, friends seeking information about recreational events, couples planning vacations and more. Although iClone is based on collaborative search, it slightly differs from it in that it aims to enable collaboration on performing search tasks at-large, with people not on one’s contact list [1].
So, what have we done? We have been able to migrate the stand-alone implementation to a browser-based implementation. Below are some screenshots of the implementation. The work is still in project, but we have made a significant progress on it compared to when we started two weeks ago.
Taking a look at the above screenshots, any extension developer would appreciate how much work has been done. The current implementation includes implementing interfaces, such nsILoginManager and nsIPromptService. My student did the whole work in a week, and the project repository is at http://code.google.com/p/iclone-ext/. We are currently exploring an HTML 5 feature that could help us represent data on a radar.
I will be reporting my experiences at the online class later and will keep you posted on the iClone project.
References
- http://queens.db.toronto.edu/~papaggel/docs/papers/all/WI08-socialNavigation.pdf
- http://mastoris.wordpress.com/