Informatics in Education

Social bookmarking services became very popular recently. Easy of use, possibility to share and discover in addition to accessibility though the Internet, turns social bookmarking systems into powerful repository of shared knowledge. Obviously this attracts attention of educational institutions and recently such systems started to appear under their domains. However, usually these systems stay separate and limit their users by their bounds. It means that separate systems' students could reach each other and use knowledge base, aggregated in other systems. On the other side, institutions usually want to own this assembled data and do not give away collected knowledge base to third side. This issue does not allow building social bookmarking systems that can be used by multi-institutional users. An idea is to develop distributed system where every institution will have their own database, but, on the other hand, will allow exploring and using data from other network sources. This article overviews possible distributed system architecture models and suggests a solution that will eliminate such service issues. Moreover, two different approaches towards distributed services communication are evaluated in this article: SOAP vs. iCamp FeedBack. SOAP is a lightweight XML based protocol for exchanging structured information between distributed applications. FeedBack is another model that uses plain RSS feed to transmit data. Both models are tested and evaluated in this article.