20 Presentation

The task of the Presentation project is to publish information about the activities related to the research plan and results achieved. Beside our own publications we also support presentation activities of other researchers. Because of the character of the research plan we focus primarily on electronic presentation forms.

20.1 Web Server

The main platform for the electronic presentation of the research plan are the servers www.cesnet.cz (Czech version) and www.ces.net (in English). Majority of our results are available there - either directly, or as links to other servers operated by CESNET.

Figure 20.1: Server www.cesnet.cz/www.ces.net - standard page, its version for print (upper right), special seasonal design (lower left) and sample of English web (lower right)

The server has three different interfaces:

Czech public: The most extensive one. Here we provide public information on the CESNET2 network, research and other activities of the association.
English public: Intended for our international partners and interested persons. The contents are similar to the previous one, although its extent is smaller. During 2003 we moved this interface to a separate virtual server named www.ces.net.
Private: It is used for the internal communication of participating researchers. Access is limited to users authenticated by the CAAS system.

We re-worked the whole server in 2003. For the most part, this change covered the translation of all pages from HTML into XHTML 1.0, actually to the strict version of XHTML 1.0. Due to the lack of formatting tools in this language version, all formatting is implemented using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

The combination of XHTML and CSS allows to easily modify the design of the whole server. It offers the opportunity to create a media-specific designs (for example a version for print) and deploy temporary looks created for specific occasions. For example, around the turn of the year we deployed a "PF 2004" design (see Figure).

The change of the code also motivated an adaptation of the structure of our WWW presentation. We tried to simplify it and help the visitors with orientation in the contents. To this end, we decreased the number of items in the main menu, reorganised and enriched some sections, introduced a bar at the top containing links to other important CESNET servers and added alternate paths to important information. The steps described above led to a total change in the server design.

Naturally, the contents of the server have been maintained. We added the following significant materials in 2003:

Annual report on research activities in 2002 in the Czech and English languages.
2002 annual report of CESNET Association (the report is bilingual).
Materials form public workshops we organized, typically containing the program, presentations and video feeds of individual contributions.
Technical reports written by CESNET researchers.

The server is available over both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols.

20.2 Publishing Activities

The most extensive publication issued in 2003 is the annual report on research activities in 2002 containing 235 pages. This year we decided for the first time to create two language mutations of this report - the Czech one (published January 15th) and the English one (published February 7th).

The preparation of the English version turned out to be rather difficult. Given the limited time ¹, we decided to use a professional translation agency. The resulting translation had unfortunately varying quality and required a lot of additional work.

Nonetheless, the existence of the English report has been appreciated by our foreign partners. We thus plan to translate this report too². However, we decided to change the method of its preparation, namely to ask the researchers to translate their contributions themselves and consequently proof-read these materials.

Our collaboration with the Lupa magazine continued. Lupa is an on-line magazine focusing on the Internet in the Czech Republic. We published a few dozen articles there during 2003 covering advanced networking technology, services, and interesting projects in this area.

Specific results on individual projects are documented in technical reports. In 2003 we published 30 reports - more than two thirds of them being in English and one bilingual. The number and language structure of technical reports improved significantly compared to previous year.

We continued publishing of the Datagram bulletin in which we inform CESNET members and other institutions about new features of CESNET2 network and activities related to its development. Three regular issues and one special³ have been published in 2003.

All the documents mentioned above are available in electronic form from the server www.cesnet.cz, see especially the "Documents" section.

20.3 Workshops and conferences

In 2003 we organised two workshops with the goal of bringing our research results to a broader audience.

On February 20th we held the workshop New trends in the development of high-speed networks and their applications. Speakers included representatives of European commission, Czech ministries of informatics and education, and foreign NRENs. The workshop was focused on current trends and perspectives of future development of leading edge networks and applications using them. Support of such activities - various projects and programs - was also discussed.

The second workshop, on October 22nd, had the title IPv6 - development and deployment. We invited primarily relevant specialists working for Czech Internet providers and larger networks operators and tried to share with them our experience in the IPv6 area in the hope that it will aid the deployment of IPv6 in real networks. Speakers were researchers who work on our project Implementation of IPv6 in CESNET2 network.

Figure 20.2: Video from the IPv6 workshop

This workshop has been appreciated by the participants who expressed their interest in this kind of workshops. Therefore, we plan further workshops focusing on modern networking technology - like IP telephony, network measurement and evaluation, quality of service and so on.

Both workshops were broadcasted to the Internet and presentations and recordings of all contributions are available on www.cesnet.cz.

As in previous years, in collaboration with Palacký University in Olomouc we organised the conference Broadband networks and their applications. Our colleagues contributed six papers to the conference programme:

Liberouter, IPv6 router (Antoš, Novotný)
Security in broadband networks (Denemark, Hladká)
Usage of a high-speed networks for the need of medical applications (Dostál, Slavíček, Petrenko)
Communication using the AccesGrid Point technology (Hladká, Holub, Rebok)
Lectures from the recording (Hladká, Liška)
Usage of IP telephony in CESNET2 network (Vozňák)

Footnotes:

We needed the report as a basis for consultation with foreign specialists during the preparation of new research plan.
As you can see, the plan has been realized ;-)
dedicated to the call for projects for the CESNET development fund

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