Retooling the World Wide Web for Its Original Purpose: Modernising the Web for University Research

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In early 2005 I was asked to assist an international research group (funded by the Australian Research Council) by producing a website to improve the disemmination of research results, provide a unified point where project outputs could be showcased and a repository of print and multimedia sources for internal and external use.

Two previous attempts to provide a web presence for other groups were implemented with a static set of web pages, and subsequently with the Scoop "collaborative media application". Neither of these approaches were entirely satisfactory, so the prototype for the Colabr8 project was built using the Maypole web application framework. However Maypole was not satisfactory to implement this due to lack of flexibility, and the Catalyst framework is being used to refactor the prototype into a more general tool.

As a part of a further engagement with the Centre for Leadership and Knowledge management, I was asked to implement a similar system to foster collaboration among group members. Because this post is funded internally, this project is much more constrained by university politics, and so is an opportunity to develop Colabr8 into a form where it can become a useful systems integration tool for researchers. It allows for leverage of internal IT resources where possible. Catalyst, being a web framework with a focus on systems integration is ideal for this.

This talk will focus on how Catalyst is being used to provide academic researcers with a flexible but useable framework which can satisfy internal requirements for secure and integrated web based systems, but also has sufficient flexibility to cover a range of requirements for researchers who wish to use the world wide web as a collaboration tool.

Stream: Perl

Paper: Retooling the World Wide Web for Its Original Purpose

Kieren started his career in psychology and worked for a number of years with closed head injury survivors. He has been working in the school of Management and Marketing at Wollongong University for the past three years, and has used perl extensively for data management, and web programming. For the last 12 months he has been working on improving web based tools to improve the work flow for researchers, and to improve their ability to communicate and disemminate their work over the World Wide Web.