Thursday, October 27, 2011

A term in computer science and website programming: weblet for individual web page

A weblet was defined by Al Globus and Chris Beaumont at the NASA Ames Research Center as “a highly interconnected portion of the World Wide Web devoted to a particular end, usually maintained by a single individual or organization and located at a single site” [1]. Globus and Beaumont were primarily concerned with educational materials and their access via Internet. For example, the Annotated Scientific Visualization Weblet Bibliography is a listing of weblets maintained by universities, government laboratories, military and commercial sites, providing data, pictures, animations and movies in specific domains of interest [2]. (Remember, this was more than ten years before the YouTube take-off).

Netlingo describes weblet as a techie-speak term that refers to a set of documents accessible via hyperlinks from a starting page [3]. One common feature of a weblet is that it assists site users with in-depth information or demonstrations in connection with a specialized topic. The word microsite may qualify as a synomym for weblet [4]. I guess, my CurlySMILES cluster of pages and subpages present a weblet example—confined to the cheminformatics domain.

References and notes
[1] Al Globus and Chris Beaumont: Spinning a Useful Weblet, 1994 [alglobus.net/NASAwork/papers/RNR-94-017/RNR-94-017.html].
[2] Al Globus:  Annotated Scientific Visualization Weblet Bibliography, 1994  [www.pitt.edu/~pwm/visbiblio.html].
[3] netlingo: Weblet [www.netlingo.com/word/weblet.php].
[4] For comparison and further details see Wikipedia sites about  weblet, microsite and minisite.


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