MIDTERM

From Web Science 2009 class

Midterm Coverage/Review sheet:

Preparing for the midterm

Believe it or not, we've actually covered a lot and, I hope, you've learned a lot about the infrastructure of the World Wide Web. Here's what I believe you should know based on the material we've gone over in class (and if you are comfortable with these topics, you should do well on the midterm):

1 - URIs and HTTP headers in Detail

 The material covered in the slides at 
    http://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/spring08/websci/URI-HTTP-details.pdf
   is all fair game
       esp. URIs vs. URLs
       The parts of a URL
    HTTP response types (by class, not by number) 
    The HTTP request methods
    HTTP headers

2 - Web architecture in practice

What is a three-tiered web app (dynamic content server) and how is it accessed.

3 - Crawling

 Polite crawlers
 Robots.txt
 loop/dup elimination (definition, simple explanations)
 crawler traps

4 - page rank and search

 The page rank formula (and being able to apply it)
 Relationship between crawler and search engine
 Reverse Index and what it comprises (pages, words, word locations, special features)

5 – Recommender Systems

The basic idea behind recommenders
User vs. item based recommendations
Computing a recommendation score (don't need to memorize the formula, but understand what it represents)

I won't promise that I won't add something not directly on this list, but I repeat, if you're comfortable with this material, you should do fine.