The Evolution of Healthcare Applications in the Web 2.0 Era - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 309

content. Community members, should register once and login every time they want to
join the community. The registration of new members should be controlled by the
administrators. The identity of expert members (doctors, company officials, scientists
etc) should be checked and certified by the administrators, where as simple members
can join by giving a contact e-mail address.
Once inside the community, registered users are able to participate in the various
activities (i.e. chat with doctors or other members, perform public discussions, attend
a video podcast or register to news feeds). The community experts create and publish
new content and are charged with the moderation of group discussions, and the filter-
ing of content uploaded by non experts. They use the wiki and tagging services to
accumulate and organize the knowledge base of the community and inform on new
findings using the news feeds.
3.3 The Assembly of Web and Web 2.0 Tools
A web site is necessary to welcome web visitors and guide potential members
into joining the community. The site should provide informative content on the com-
munity aim and structure and can be created as a joint effort of the universities or
educational institutes that support the community. The web site will advertise the
educational programs and will provide information concerning every day activities of
each course, news and announcements of interest to the students.
The web site administration should be performed by technical staff from the edu-
cational partners of the community (i.e. the university). Coordination tasks will be
held by the registrar office, who will be responsible for the members' accounts, their
participation in virtual classes etc.
A smart and cost free solution for the web site is presented in [24]. There, the web
site was a blog, created by the university. The blog was visible to anyone, but practi-
cally only registered community members were allowed to update content or com-
ment. In an effort to delegate administration tasks, a “weblog umbrella” can replace
the community portal (see Figure 3 ). Another solution, which requires access to a web
server, is to deploy the web site in an open source Content Management System.
Blogs (or web logs) are easily updatable websites where administrators can post
messages by filling a few forms and without special knowledge on web design tech-
nologies. Separate blogs for each field of interest allow experts to distribute news and
knowledge in an organized manner, to add or drop material, to add short notices or
announcements and manage the comments or posts of the community members. The
registered members are permitted to comment on the blog posts thus providing the
community with useful feedback. The visitors are able only to read announcement or
comments.
Educational activities of the community can be ideally supported by a web based
course management system (i.e. Moodle, Mahara, WebCT, Blackboard etc). Such
systems are specialized in managing and delivering on line courses, and assemble
various community tools such as forums, wikis etc. In the majority of courses tutors
use the community application solely for provided reading material to students. How-
ever, in several cases, students and professors need the forum, chat and other services
in order to coordinate their actions. When an integrated course management system is
not available, the community can be still operational by combining various open
source tools.