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Tech Report kmi-99-02 Abstract


Constituencies for Users: How to Develop them by Interpreting Logs of Web Site Access
Techreport ID: kmi-99-02
Date: 1999
Author(s): Michael J. Wright
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The number of electronic journals is growing as rapidly as the World Wide Web on which many are published. Readership of an electronic journal is important to quantify, just as it is for a printed journal. In maintaining the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME), a scholarly electronic journal open to all, we require readership statistics more meaningful than the variations on the theme of "number of hits" given by many log analysis packages. Important aspects of JIME's open access are the decisions to not require subscription, nor the use of hidden tracking aids such as cookies. Readership information is acquired from the server log of client requests. We are investigating the identification of user sessions from such logs, and the development of classification of sessions into constituencies of readership. In this paper, we present the result of manual analysis from which we are developing automatic analysis mechanisms.

Publication(s):

AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Agents in Cyberspace, March 22-24, 1999, Stanford University, California
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.