In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science
Aysha I Shaikh
will defend her thesis
RFaIR - Radio Frequency aided Information Retrieval
Abstract
The term ‘Information Radiator’ (IR) was first introduced by Alistair Cockburn. An IR is a large display of critical team information updated continuously and located at a place which can be viewed anytime by team members. They have proved to increase the performance and efficiency of a team by enhancing the open communication of information among team members. They are very helpful in tracking the progress of a project, work breakdown, etc. Unfortunately, many of the current IR’s have been so developed that its true essence has been marred. Some of the reasons being, using charts and whiteboards instead of electronic medium as display, inefficient scripts to retrieve information limiting the resource of information to text files, and inhibiting the power of visual graphics, and tool being domain specific thus restraining extensions to future data resources. Thus an absence of an automated generic tool that could be deployed over the internet has been observed.
In this thesis we propose an approach to build the tool as a web service which can be deployed over the internet and consumed as a service by the users. The web service retrieves corresponding data from a particular backend, for an ID it receives from the client application. To automate the process of getting the context of the person for whom the information has to be fetched and displayed, we have made use of the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. We introduce a layer of abstraction between the web service and the various backend resources from which it fetches data, thus promoting extensibility to future backend resources without modifying existing code.