The Second International Network Conference (INC 2000)

Citation

Furnell, S. (2001), "The Second International Network Conference (INC 2000)", Internet Research, Vol. 11 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2001.17211aaa.002

The Second International Network Conference (INC 2000)

The Second International Network Conference (INC 2000)

The papers in this issue of Internet Research are based on a selection of submissions from the Second International Network Conference (INC 2000) that was held from 3-6 July 2000 in Plymouth, on the south-west coast of the UK.

INC 2000 was the second event in a series of conferences aimed at providing a forum for the latest research in computer networks and related technologies. The Internet and the WWW obviously feature highly in such discussions, and almost all of the papers presented had some relationship to Internet technologies. The conference followed on from an earlier event, INC '98, papers from which were previously presented in Internet Research, Vol. 9 No. 1.

INC 2000 was staged by the University of Plymouth, with co-sponsorship from the British Computer Society, the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE), Orange Personal Communications Services, Netscient Limited and Internet Research. The main themes addressed by the conference were as follows:

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  Internet and WWW technologies and applications.

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  Network technologies and management.

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  Multimedia integration.

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  Distributed technologies.

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  Security and privacy.

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  Social and cultural issues.

The resulting conference was a truly international event, with delegates from 18 countries in attendance. Authors and delegates included a diverse mixture from academia and industry, ensuring that a number of different perspectives were represented. The full conference proceedings includes a total of 41 papers, with coverage ranging from discussion of applications and services, down to details of specific underlying technologies. (Full copies of the conference proceedings can be obtained from Denise Horne at the University of Plymouth, UK. E-mail: d.horne@plymouth.ac.uk).

The papers selected for this special issue of Internet Research have been chosen to be representative of the broad range of topics covered by the conference, while at the same time addressing topics of relevance to the journal readership.

A number of the papers give consideration to performance aspects of Internet communication. Destounis et al. investigate the potential of compressing hypertext pages for transfer over low bandwidth connections. This is desirable in the increasingly congested Internet, as well as for assisting inherently low bandwidth mobile technologies such as PDAs. The paper from Kothari and Claypool continues in a similar vein, by benchmarking the performance of a range of dynamic Web page generation technologies. This has particular bearing on the performance of Web servers and the paper presents a model that can be used to predict this. The paper from Ghita et al. is taken from one of the technical streams of the conference and is related to the issue of IP telephony – a key topic in the industry at this time. The paper identifies the need to monitor the performance of the network to ensure quality of service and presents a method for achieving this in a non-intrusive manner.

Finkel et al. discuss the potential of the Internet as a means for conducting distributed computations, harnessing the power of anonymous host systems that can voluntarily choose to participate in a collective task. The paper discusses different methods of achieving this and outlines the practical experiences of the authors in relation to a pilot distributed application.

Delicato et al. consider the familiar problem of searching for information on the Web and retrieving relevant documents. The paper presents an agent-based architecture and an experimental system for filtering Web pages based on profiled user feedback. Martins et al. also recognise the problem posed by the volume of information on the Internet and consider the use of mobile agents in two e-commerce related information search and discovery scenarios. The issue of mobile agents is also targeted by Antonopoulos et al., who consider the specific requirements for access control within a distributed environment. Their paper describes mechanisms that could be applied to achieve access control in Internet-based security systems.

The papers by Carroll et al. and Tian are taken from the more application-focused streams of the conference and illustrate the uses to which the technologies can be put. Carroll et al. describe a virtual community project, established to mirror and supplement a real-world community in a US town. Such an approach facilitates a range of online, community-oriented applications and demonstrates that technology does not have to lead to the replacement of our traditional view of society but can, in fact, add value to it. Tian considers another area in which Internet technologies may benefit society, namely the provision of Web-based educational services. A prototype system and associated trial is described, identifying the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the approach.

The majority of these papers have been extended from the versions that appeared in the conference proceedings. This has given the authors the opportunity to provide greater detail, as well as, in some cases, to update the content to reflect more recent developments and/or feedback received during the conference itself.

Steven FurnellNetwork Research GroupDeparment of Communication and Electronic Engineering, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK.