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A new editorial team is in charge of the design and the compound of this SunSite since mid of 2001. Our aim is to offer focused and lasting information in an ever changing web world. We are trying to keep this site up to date and give you access to interesting links and downloads.
If you do not visit this SunSite for the first time, you might have noticed a certain difference - apart from the new layout, we also gave this page a new structure. Therefore, we reorganized the topics to provide an easier overview about the supplied material. Besides the well selected software archive, information about Sun and our science & culture field, we established the virtual communities area, where you will find information about special communities software, literature, guides and links related to this topic. We will also show some existing communities and try to analyze how they work.
Sun SITE Central Europe was founded by Manfred Jeusfeld and Matthias Jarke in 1994 with the idea of supporting scientific co-operation. Thanks to a generous hardware donantion by Sun Microsystems GmbH, Germany, the service became online in 1995 with Stefanie Kethers as first editor-in-chief. In the early years, downloads from ftp archives were dominant. Later, a shared group workspace, an online proceedings server, and sites for scientific workgroups were added.
The SunSITE project at RWTH Aachen University started 1995 as part of the „Sun Software, Information & Technology Exchange“ network. The SunSITE Central Europe is online as a WWW and FTP server since april 1995. It started as a Sun SPARC Server 1000E with 6 CPUs, 256 MB of memory and around 16 GB of disk space. The Sparc Server was replaced in 1998 with a Sun Enterprise 450 (2 CPUs, 640 MB memory, ~100 GB disk space). The 450 served around 55000 http hits per day and delivered around 135GB ftp data per day. At this time the server had 1,1GB of memory and around 400 GB disk space. In the beginning of 2003 a SUN Fire 280R was taken into service to replace the 450. After a transition period this server was taken into full service in April 2003. This machine now has two 900 MHz UltraSparc III processors, 4 GB main memory and around 2 TB of disk space. Today the SunSITE contains information about science, culture and virtual communities. And we still run an ftp server giving access to the SunSITE Software Archive.
Please turn your attention on the Collaborative research center FK 427 "Media and cultural communication", a special research project in cooperation with the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne. The different aspects of the topic find their expression in various approaches from the computer based sciences to linguistic, from art history to cognitive sciences. Our project in the center "Impacts of networked multimedia information systems on cooperation and organisation of knowledge in cultural science communities" analyses and simulates concepts in cultural knowledge organisation and ways of cooperation in cultural sciences. Existing cultural/ cultural science oriented virtual communities are welcome to contact us in order to exchange information and maybe to be integrated into this research project.
People interested in mirroring information or software on this SunSite please write us an email. If you found something interesting related to the SunSite and its topics and you want to see it there or if you have good ideas how to improve it, do not hesitate and contact us, too.
(Official RWTH Disclaimer)
... the former editorial team of this SunSite: Dr. Stefanie Kethers (editor-in-chief), Guido Bunsen (software archives), Christian Scholz aka Mr. Topf (design) and Andreas Hudzieckzek (programming).