Information management: some changes after the Web 2.0 shift

The shift from the so-called Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 has been studied and analized in the best way possible by Tim O’Reilly in his famous pages on “What is Web 2.0” and there is probably very little left to say.

However, one can start from there and see how (and if, or to what extent), more in details, that shift is changing the approach to old issues in information science, like how exactly information flows and how to improve actual accessibility to information. In this perspective, the social aspects that are usually the core of every discussion on Web 2.0 are taken for granted and as a starting point, while the focus is on the concepts there are more relevant to “information management” when it comes to building effective integrated information systems.

RESTful web services and information sharing

For years web services have been identified with SOAP and XML-RPC and creating and using web services has been considered a task for advanced programmers, a situation that has limited the large-scale adoption of this technology.

Over the last few years, many big actors (1) in the Internet have started offering remote APIs through RESTful (2) web services.

GFAR and “MIS”: coherently managing information on organizations, projects and experts

In the context of the process towards coherence in agricultural information systems and in coordination with the Content Management Taskforce set in place by the Expert Consultation on International Information Systems for Agricultural Science and Technology (Rome, 2005), GFAR, in collaboration with partner organizations, particularly FAO and Wageningen International, is focusing its attention on activities and projects aiming at building coherent and integrated Management Information Systems (MIS).
Management Information Systems (MIS) provide information on objects related to the management of activities and projects in ARD: organizations, experts, projects and project outputs. A need for such comprehensive and structured information services has clearly emerged in recent years.

Drupal CMS

Drupal (www.drupal.org) is a CMS written in PHP.
Drupal is quite reliable and you can have a website running in a very few moves even if you don’t know PHP.

There are only a few themes (graphic templates) available and they are all very similar, but you can write your own template in PHP once you understand how to do it (basically, you copy one of the core themes and change it as you like it). And there are a lot of modules available for download from the Drupal website, which allow you to do a lot of interesting things without programming (like aggregating RSS news from other websites, creating a calendar of events etc.).

Infoglue CMS

InfoGlue (www.infoglue.org) is a CMS written in Java.
InfoGlue is the CMS used for EGFAR.

The strong points of InfoGlue are: its reliability, its very good Model-View-Controller (MVC) model implementation, its in-built support for categorisation, its ability to create infinite content types, the very granular management of users and permissions, the powerful API and custom JSP tags which make it more a framework than a simple CMS and the ease of use once the system has been set up.