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Date	May 2018	Marks available	3	Reference code	18M.2.SL.TZ0.8
Level	SL	Paper	2	Time zone	no time zone
Command term	Outline	Question number	8	Adapted from	N/A

Question

RunAndBeyond is a sports knowledge website, offering expert knowledge and technical tips on sport disciplines. Official teams and associations are invited to include some of their own multimedia digital resources to RunAndBeyond.

A team of triathletes, finding their sport discipline under-represented in the website, wants to contribute content for RunAndBeyond. The team intends to use a wiki in collaborating online with other similar interested groups in triathlon when creating and updating their own resource.

The triathlete’s online resource provides a variety of references through external links, and one of them points to:

ftp://files.tri-events.cc/site/index.php/en/general-info

There are also external links on the website to videos and some of these are transferred using lossy compression. When these videos are transferred, they can either be streamed or downloaded for future viewing.

Describe how a wiki can support the ongoing collaboration in producing the triathletes’ resource.

[3]

State the reason why the above link is a URL.

[1]

b.i.

Outline the processing that takes place when the line of code above is executed.

[3]

b.ii.

Suggest why lossy compression should be the compression technique used.

[4]

The RunAndBeyond website continually automatically updates its content regarding a live sporting event.

Suggest how a dynamic web page would function in providing this service to the user.

[4]

Markscheme

Award up to [3 max].

Note: An expansion from the technical/computational perspective only (not sociological one) is expected about aspects of the chosen method of online interaction.

Aspects that can gain credit:
Editing, permissions layer, ownership, tracking of updates, security (open to vandalism/non-monitored contributors), open source (interoperability).

Software for wikis provides collaborative editing sharing of information of content, directly from the browser;
Updates are usually tracked in wikis (also to be removed afterwards) as they come from different authors / usually non-moderated / added content can also be removed later on (also by others);
The evolution of a wiki is more immediate and spontaneous because updates are immediately visible;
The wiki can easily be vandalized with incorrect/unauthoritative information, but it can also be quickly amended/corrected if this is realized quickly;

Award up to [1 max].
It specifies how to access the resource/show the path/contains domain name, with the ftp protocol;

b.i.

Award up to [3 max]:
It sends a GET/PHP request to the server tri-events.cc;
To execute en/general-info (index.php);
And the result of this execution is made available to the client /browser (with ftp);
(It specifies to use the ftp protocol to send the request and to return the resource;)

Note: Do not accept DNS.

b.ii.

Award up to [4 max].
Lossy compression results in files of smaller size;
It may be needed for video streaming because the server provides execution through scripting;
And guaranteeing streaming without interruptions is a priority;
It may be a choice for downloading video for local execution to manage outgoing traffic on popular servers/increases the speed (using smaller files);

Award up to [4 max].

Award [1 max] for identifying a technology that is needed award up to [3 max] for an extension describing how the technology is used and interacts with other components.

Example 1:
An interactive web page that has an auto-refresh/automatic update extension;
So that every N seconds a script is executed to reload the page;
The web page is linked to an underlined database/data source
OR interrogates specific databases/news databanks;
That are distributed and collectively provide regular updates;
And they can be displayed back using the script;

Example 2:
A dynamic web page equipped with a RSS feed;
That collects/aggregates news from sources that cover that live event;
The feed is in form of an update in XML;
Therefore, it can be used to feed an underlining (distributed) database or the web page/uses syndication/can be immediately interpreted by the browser;
And it can then be processed by some script to be displayed back in the original web page;

Examiners report

[N/A]

b.i.

[N/A]

b.ii.

[N/A]

Syllabus sections

Option C: Web science » C.1 Creating the web

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17N.2.SL.TZ0.8d:

A fragment of a script and a web form are provided below.
In the script some functions are not implemented, and only their specification is provided.

<?php
  //include a database of urls
  include('url_db.php');
  $url = $short = "";

  if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST")
  { $url = $_POST['url'];
    $short = make_short($url);
    function make_short($u)
    { $x = make_alpha_string($u);
      $y = first4_last4($x);
      $z = limits($x);
      $v = $y. ".".$z;   //string concatenation
      return $v;
  }

  function make_alpha_string($u)
  { // It removes, in this order: substrings corresponding to
    // protocol names, the substring www, and all characters
    // except for letters
  }

  function first4_last4($u)
  { // It returns the string made of the first 4 characters
    // followed by the last 4 characters of $u
  }

  function limits($u)
  { // It returns the string made of the first character and
    // last character of $u
  }

  mysql_query("
    INSERT INTO url_db(orig_url, short_url, url_ip) VALUES
    ( '".$_POST['url']."',
      '".$short."',
      '".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."'
    )
  ");
 }
?>

<form method="post" action="">
URL:
<input type="text" name="url" />
<br><br>
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

Describe the processing that occurs when the form is filled with the URL https://www.the2nd.org/bin.php?id=70 that the server discovers is associated with the IP address 172.16.254.1.

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Option C: Web science

Question

Markscheme

Examiners report

Syllabus sections

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