A World-Wide blackboard.
Koen De Bosschere, Bart Theeten, T. Geens, R. D'halleweyn · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 1999
The World Wide Blackboard (WWBB) is a new Internet application enabling applications to automatically make use of the vast amount of data available on the Internet. It consists of a server, currently implemented as a CGI-application, and clients that use the WWBB API to extract data from a blackboard. The data on the blackboard are stored as relational tables which allows them to be queried. The data can be stored in files on the server or can be dynamically extracted from existing Web pages by means of a format specification, which can either be embedded in the Web page or be provided by the client. A typical WWBB application contacts a WWBB server, sends a query, and waits for its result (e.g., an exchange rate, telephone number, list of students for a course). As the format of the result is known, it can immediately be used by the application. The access to the Internet is completely transparent to the user.