Web-based application for Collaborative Ethical Decision Making

Abstract: Computer  ethics is a scientific discipline, which can help us to reach ethical usability of IT-system by developing knowledge and provide the main principles and the guidelines of ethics. It helps us to collect and interpret  information and use it in real design projects. To achieve this goal, we need an application to generate the structure  of the procedure  from analyzing the problem to gain the solutions. The main objective of this thesis is to redesign and implement the EthXpert system as a web application in a way that users can access the software in a collaborative environment. The aspects of the thesis are choosing a suitable communication protocol, developing a collaborative ethical decision system as a web application and evaluating system by analyzing the answers of students (who will apply this software to our online survey as a research part of the thesis). In order to implement ColLab, a research has been done about available APIs, which equipped by collaborative functionalities. ColLab is based on the most recent technologies such as Ajax, jQuery, MySQL, NodeJS, PHP, HTML5 (Canvas) and CSS3. The MVC pattern has been used to structure  ColLab application. During the research phase of this thesis, the data gathered from the questionnaire has been analyzed based on qualitative and quantitative methods.