UCI ICS 1C Syllabus, Summer 1996
Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval

Lectures: IERF B015, MW 10-12:50
Labs: CS 173/183, MW 2:00-4:50pm.
Instructor: Vitus Leung, vitus@ics.uci.edu
Teaching Assistant: Jason Cahill, jcahill@ics.uci.edu
Text: The World Wide Web Unleashed 1996 (third edition) by John December and Neil Randall, 1995, Sams Publishing (Indianapolis, Indiana, USA), ISBN 1-57521-040-1.
Additional Assigned and Recommended Readings: Available from Engineering Copy Center, 203 Engineering Tower, labeled as ``assigned'' (i.e., required) or ``recommended'' (i.e., additional material that is not required).
Computer Systems Used: ICS Computing Labs (CS 173/183) and UCI Office of Academic Computing ``EA'' systems, ea.oac.uci.edu, or ``ORION'' system, orion.oac.uci.edu
Course URL: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~vitus/ics1c/

What this course is about

The world-wide Internet has become a massive repository of information and tool for communication. This course will explore a range of information resources and communication tools available over the Internet, with emphases on the organization of computer networks and the information they provide.

Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (NIDR) is a generally accepted term in the networking community for the productive use of the variety of resources, techniques, and underlying concepts surrounding remotely accessible information. ``How-to'' details about using the various tools for NIDR are not a principal focus of this course, although students will learn them ``along the way'' through their laboratory work. Instead, the course focuses on concepts and issues underlying the network, its resources, and access tools.

For example, using a World-Wide Web browser one can examine such issues as these: What is a network protocol, why are protocols important, what protocols are used by various information providers? Many fundamental issues in systems architecture appear clearly when examining network-based applications: the interaction of various separate sequential processes, the role of cache and cache management, achieving reliability in the face of errors, building systems at successive levels of abstraction, various interface issues (both human and between systems), and so on. Networked information access systems provide concrete examples which take such concepts out of the realm of unmotivated, disconnected abstraction into an arena of broad, immediate discourse.

Course Structure

Class Participation
Class participation includes both verbal and written communication with the instructional staff and with other students. As hard as it may seem to ask a ``foolish'' question, the most foolish question is the one which remains unasked because of concern about ``how I will appear to others.'' Each person in this class should feel ``It is my responsibility to say when I do not understand something, because if I know enough to know that I do not understand, then surely there must be someone else in the class who is no better off than I am and may not even be aware that there is an issue here. (Heck, they may not even be able to understand that last sentence!)''


Your comments are welcome via e-mail to vitus@ics.uci.edu or using a form which allows for anonymous comments:
Current as of 12 September 1996