Designed for Good: Community Well-Being Oriented Online Databases for Youth - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 310

A wide range of web spaces that promote youth-well-being have already been
implemented. However, our survey of youth web spaces revealed two important
limitations. First of all, the web spaces provide their information in a manner that is
not very engaging for teenagers. The content is provided in a static fashion or tries
to be so flash that the web spaces become unusable. Second, although there are web
spaces that address various topics concerning the life and well-being of youth, there
are no integrated and well-governed web spaces that could provide youth with a
central contact point when querying the web for their well-being. Our studies have
shown that the primary contact point for youth when enquiring sensitive topics
concerning their well-being on the web is the Google search engine. Although
Google governs some of its search terms such as sex, many topics that youth search
for can lead to more dubious places.
We therefore explore the implementation of a database which can provide a
community-driven approach to assist youth in seeking information using search
engines in a way that enables their developmental requirements. Conceptually, the
requirements for our community database can be expressed in two modes of user
interaction. The first is users actively seeking for information. They can achieve this
by entering a search term and either clicking a button search or whisper. By using the
button search, the search term that the user has entered will be visible to other users of
the platform under his or her primary user name. The button whisper will also publish
the search query to other users, but anonymously. This brings into play multiple
identities as discussed in the framework section. The second mode of interaction is
assisting other users in their search queries. As every search query is made available
to other users, these have the opportunity to click on them and visit a unique page
which represents this search query. Here, users can post additional content such as
their comments or links to sources they deem relevant to the query at hand.
Our aim was to explore the combination of technologies that can be used to fulfil
these requirements and whether an implementation can be guided by our proposed
conceptual architecture. Our vertical prototype is not aimed at providing an
integrated user experience of the different aspects discussed below. Some parts
have been implemented in Java Swing or as a JavaScript prototype.
One possible combination of components and technologies is given in Fig. 12.7 .
In the following paragraphs, we will discuss important aspects of our explorative
implementation in greater detail.
One important requirement we found in our implementation was that composi-
tion and orchestration could be supported only when the database enables the user
to work with data in a network representation. Composition inherently requires a
hierarchical organisation of data when smaller pieces are aggregated to mash-ups or
composites. These composites in turn can be reused to build higher-level mash-ups
or composites. In terms of the search queries, the whole discussion about one search
term can be a useful contribution to the discussion of another search term. Users
will thereby be enabled to link one search term with the other creating a hierarchical
structure of composites. As some elements are to be reused in more than one
composite, a network organisation of the data emerges. Orchestration follows the
same process as composition. However, unlike composition, some elements that are