Evolutionary Web

Professor Athula Ginige
School of Computing and Information Technology
University of Western Sydney, Australia

Tuesday 20 August at 11am

From the time of invention the Web has grown tremendously. It was mainly due to its ease of use, search capabilities, universal access and availability of technologies. The Web has evolved from its origin, the static document Web to many other states with relation to the way information is processed, media used and applications developed. Considering information processing technologies, there have been lot of effort put on to the Semantic Web and the intelligent Web, the Web of future. With applications development technologies, initially the Web pages became dynamic, interactive, with added security and then evolutionary.

But still there are many problems in developing Web applications mainly because users cannot fully specify their requirements at the beginning. Even if they specify, still the requirements change with time with changing business procedures and technologies. For example more and more small to medium enterprises are E enabling their business processes starting from a simple Web site. This in turn changes their business, requiring further changes to their business processes. To accommodate this, we need a Web application that can evolve with the changing user requirements.

We have developed Component Based E Business Deployment Shell (CBEADS) to support evolutionary growth of Web applications with the growth of an organisation. At present this technology is trailed in seven organizations. By end of 2004 we are hoping to use this in 40 organizations as part of the "E transforming Western Sydney" project.

Short resume

Prof. Athula Ginige has a B.Sc First Class (Hons) from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. At present he is the Professor of Information Technology at University of Western Sydney, Australia and also the head of the School of Computing and Information Technology. He has done extensive research in the areas of multimedia systems, development of large scale Web based information systems, information structures for interactive flexible learning modules, next generation information retrieval strategies for the Web and, Electronic Business Systems for small to medium enterprises (SME's).

At present he is leading a group of researchers who are developing methodologies and technologies that organisations can use to e transform their business processes. As a pilot study currently 7 organisations in Western Sydney are transforming their business processes based on the convergence model proposed by his research group.

Professor Ginige has authored numerous academic and commercial publications in the areas of Web Engineering, multimedia, the Internet and e-business.