Future-Proofing Your Web Service Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based. URL: Abstract What is the current status of Web sites in Bristol? What challenges do Web developers face? What new opportunities are there? New technologies (RDF, XML, XSL, WAP, etc.) are being mentioned But what are they? Do I really need them? Abstract What is the current status of Web sites in Bristol? What challenges do Web developers face? What new opportunities are there? New technologies (RDF, XML, XSL, WAP, etc.) are being mentioned But what are they? Do I really need them?

2 Contents The Bristol Web Site –SiteServer Analysis –Bobby Accessibility Audit –Servers at Bristol HE Communities' Interests: –Web Site Promotion –Performance Indicators –Re-engineering New Areas Protocols, Tools and Architectures Discussion

3 The Bristol Web Site (Incomplete) survey of main Bristol Web site carried out on 19 Jul 2000 using the Microsoft SiteServer analysis package See events/seminars/ilrt-jul-2000/

4 Accessibility Audit Used Bobby Java application to report on the accessibility of the main University of Bristol Web site: Resources up to level 4 checked > 1,000 pages found 737 pages approved! See

5 Server Profile Using Netcraft.com to search *.bris.ac.uk on 18 Jul 2000: 83 servers Apache used at Mixture of departments and projects No obvious strange servers 48 servers found when looking for bristol.ac.uk See for a survey of UK HEIs

6 Problems and Opportunities What problems are you facing? What opportunities are there?

7 Current Interests Topics, developments of interest to UK HE Web management community: Promoting resources (and the institution) using the Web Performance indicators Web site re-engineering E-business and structured Web sites WAP and the Mobile Web Tools: –Content Management System –Free tools / external tools

8 Promotion You want: People to find your Web site People to find quality resources You need to: Have short domain name Use robots.txt (etc.) to restrict access Guidelines on directory structures to support management of areas Consider use of "submit it" submission tools Beware of robot traps (frames, unusual URL strings, etc.) Scrubtheweb reviewed in See

9 Performance Indicators Your management / funders may require performance indicators to justify further spending: Nos. of visitors / sessions / hits: Web stats can be dubious, but needed Nos. of links to you: Indication of perceived value Provides potential traffic / Is used in marketing Can monitor using linkpopularity.com, etc. Nos. of resources indexed in AltaVista, etc. Help people find you Indication of success in Web site promotion 10,195 remote pages pointing to main site, 35,815 to all AltaVista contains12,940 pages from main site, 25,427 (all sites) 10,195 remote pages pointing to main site, 35,815 to all AltaVista contains12,940 pages from main site, 25,427 (all sites) 18 July 2000 See lib.org/issue5/indicators/ Should you carry out such surveys systematically?

10 Reengineering What every Web manager knows: It's not fun any one  Sites are difficult to manage at (HTML) file level Need for semantics (will global change of 0191 work?) Need to manage fragments (change all MRC images with WAI P1 problems) New requirements are coming (e.g. Hero) Knowledge of (fear of) new stuff around the corner (XML, XHTML, SVG, RDF, …) Need for tools to: –Manage current problems –Deploy new solutions when they arrive Are they costly? Do we have the technical expertise?

11 A New Requirement: Hero Hero: HEFCE, SHEFC, etc funded portal to UK HE Will contain brief course information, URLs, etc for users to search on Will deliver users to departmental page Challenges for institutions: How to get large nos. of departmental information to Hero and everyone else who wants similar information Solutions: –Buy more and more data input staff –Move to a business-to-business (B2B) environment which is more scalable

12 New Requirement: WAP Some comments: In Japan more mobile than PC Internet users ( >10m according to ITWeek) Lot of investment Some interesting prototypes (e.g. ) What should UK HE do? Can't ignore it Need to thing about use of content management systems and structured file formats to author content for the Web, mobile phones, print, etc.

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14 A New Requirement: News Growing interest in automated news / content feeds Bristol filestore Dept. filestore Dept of X Web site Serve local content (copy files, use SSIs,..) Perhaps links to images Remote users can link to your resources Dept of Y Web site Serve local content (copy files, use SSIs,..) Automated feeds of content Content move easily managed and personalised Remote users can syndicate your resources (e.g. news feeds to depts, MANs and Hero) Bristol filestore Remote filestore Dept. filestore BBC News JISC News Bristol Echo news

15 Technologies In Context What technologies are needed to implement such services? Proprietary solutions XML: structured information XSLT: transforming XML to other formats RSS: an XML application designed for news feeds RDF: an XML application which provides a framework for metadata applications

16 XHTML XHTML: HTML as an XML application Current W3C Recommendation Provides the benefits of XML: –Future developments such as XLink –XSLT for transformations Look to deploy now (see Tidy and HTML-Kit) See XHTML This is XHTML.

17 XSLT XSLT: XSL Transformations W3C Recommendation Transform XML document to other XML DTD or other format (RTF, PDF, etc.) XHTML XML file for Hero WML file for WAP XSLT rules XSLT engine XML XML file for Hero WML file for WAP XHTML for Web XSLT engine XSLT rules RSS for My.MRC CMS

18 RSS RSS: Rich Site Summary Originally developed by Netscape for use in My.Netscape.com Lots of interest from providers of news services See:

19 RDF RDF: Resource Description Framework Viewed by W3C as the key architectural component of The Semantic Web Much interest in the Web research community Seems to be slow in having a real-world impact See

20 Content Management Systems Do we agree: We can't do continue Web site management by hand or by simple file-based authoring tools? Need for: Content management systems (CMS) for professional Web services (which manage technologies such as XSL, RDF, RSS, etc.) Do we go for: Expensive, shrink-wrapped systems (e.g. Vignette StoryServer, used by Guardian Unlimited) Roll your own services (e.g. PHP / ASP, Frontier, Oracle, Zope, etc.) Or will this result in limited publishing to a small portion of an institution?

21 CMS – The Problems A CMS sound great, but: CMS – the answer to my problems They sound expensive Great, an opportunity to hack some Perl / C / Java / Python scripts My Perl, … hackers have gone to earn £xxx,xxx in the City Warfare erupts - Universities are a good place for rational debate :-( From Microsoft, running on NT No problem, I'll buy a shrink-wrapped solution

22 CMS, MLE, VLE, NLE Do you want a: Content Management System (CMS) Managed learning Environment (MLE) Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Networked Learning Environment (NLE) Will you find your University has independently bought one of each

23 Web-Enabling Your MIS Why bother with: New technologies such as CMSs, which would be used by newly-established groups (Web teams) with a short history of service provision New technologies such as VLEs (MLEs) which are driven by the teaching & learning community which have limited experiences of deployment of large- scale services When you can: Web-enable your Management Information System Exploit the experiences of companies like Oracle which have experience of service support and development in large organisations

24 I've No Resources! CMS are fine but: I've no money for software Good techies leave How about: Use of externally-hosted services Can be used for Web statistics, authoring tools, user feedback, file management, Intranets, … Move towards ASPs (Application Service Providers) helped by SuperJANET 4 Opportunity to supplement national Mailing list service by National Word Processing service? See and

25 Discussion Time Any questions?