Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
Synopsis This subject familiarises students with public research networks such as AARNet and Internet. Students will be made aware of a range of data sources available through the networks, along with knowledge of a variety of tools for accessing this information. A variety of compression and encoding approaches will be explored, including ZIP and unencoded material. Students will be made aware of standard transmission formats, such as ASCII, TIFF, GIF, JPEG, MPEG, and tools for using these forms. MIME will also be studied. Students will gain an understanding of basic principles of text retrieval techniques, and achieve an appreciation of how these are applied to the research network information. Management of digital artefacts will be discussed, and manipulation of these at local machine level will be practised. The use of stand-alone and networked CD-ROM databases will provide further instances of general access databases and text retrieval issues. Students will gain basic understanding of elements of and issues associated with electronic publishing including elements of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Possible future developments will be discussed.
Assessment Examination (2 hours): 70% + Assignment: 15% + Practical Work: 15%