Developing a Web 2.0 Telemedical Education System: the AJAX-Cocoon Portal

Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, podcasts/vodcasting, blogs and semantic portals could be quite effective tools in e-learning for health professionals. If effectively deployed, such tools can offer a way to enhance students', clinicians' and patients' learning experiences, and deepens levels of learners' engagement and collaboration within medical learning environments. However, Web 2.0 requires simplicity of use as well as integration with modern web technologies. This article presents a Web 2.0 telemedical portal, which provides a social community-learning paradigm from the desk of the physician, the student, the hospital administrator, or the insurer. The presented portal utilises RESTful web services and techniques like content syndication, mushups and Asynchronous JavaScript API and XML (AJAX). The designed portal is based on the Apache Cocoon RESTful framework for sharing Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) medical case studies. Central to this article is the integration between Cocoon and AJAX. The proposed AJAX-Cocoon portal utilises a JSP portlet architecture, which manages the interaction dynamics and overcomes the shortcomings of the JSR 168 and WSRP 1.0 standards.