Saturday, October 17, 2009
Information Environment
There is now a critical mass of digital information resources that can be used to support researchers, learners, teachers and administrators in their work and study. The production of information is on the increase and ways to deal with this effectively are required. There is the need to ensure that quality information isn’t lost amongst the masses of digital data created everyday. If we can continue to improve the management, interrogation and serving of ‘quality’ information there is huge potential to enhance knowledge creation across learning and research communities. The aim of the Information Environment is to help provide convenient access to resources for research and learning through the use of resource discovery and resource management tools and the development of better services and practice. The Information Environment aims to allow discovery, access and use of resources for research and learning irrespective of their location.
What does the term 'Information Environment' mean?
The Information Environment (IE) is a term used to refer to the organization’s work to develop and provide services which enable people to find and manage information efficiently and effectively in their learning, teaching or research.
The information resources which people need are very varied - books, journals, research papers, teaching resources, videos, maps and more - and while they might be in any format they are increasingly in digital.
The Information Environment of my Choice
E-Commerce
E-commerce, (electronic commerce), is online commerce verses real-world commerce. E-commerce includes retail shopping, banking, stocks and bonds trading, auctions, real estate transactions, airline booking, movie rentals—nearly anything you can imagine in the real world. Even personal services such as hair and nail salons can benefit from e-commerce by providing a website for the sale of related health and beauty products, normally available to local customers exclusively. While e-commerce once required an expensive interface and personal security certificate, this is no longer the case. Virtual storefronts are offered by a variety of hosting services and large Internet presences such as eBay and Yahoo!, which offer turnkey solutions to vendors with little or no online experience. Tools for running successful e-commerce websites are built into the hosting servers, eliminating the need for the individual merchant to redesign the wheel. These tools include benefits like shopping carts, inventory and sales logs, and the ability to accept a variety of payment options including secure credit card transactions.
Though early e-commerce was stunted by security fears, improved technology has made millions of people worldwide feel comfortable buying online. Seeing the vast potential in e-commerce, most credit card companies helped allay fears by guaranteeing cardholders would not be held responsible for fraudulent charges as a result of online shopping. All of these factors have helped e-commerce become the booming industry it is today.
The growing popularity of e-commerce is understandable considering the time and hassle involved in running from store to store, searching for an item in the real world. It not only takes valuable time and energy, but gasoline. With today’s crowded cities and high gas prices, shopping online whenever the mood strikes—even in the middle of the night—has unarguable, unbeatable advantages. Not only is it convenient to shop at a myriad of vendors from the comfort of your computer chair, it’s also a snap to find the best deal by allowing sites like PriceGrabber and Fro ogle sift through hundreds of sellers for you.
E-commerce also has other advantages. Employee overhead is virtually nonexistent, and the yearly fee for an e-commerce website is nominal. Compare this to rental of storefront property, particularly in a busy mall. To top it off, most transactions are handled by software processes, never requiring a real person until the item is ready to be packed and shipped. This translates into real savings to the customer. As a result, real world businesses often cannot compete with their e-commerce counterparts, though one does have to watch for inflated shipping fees that might negate savings.
The Role within the E-Commerce
ECommerce Website Designer
Every website designer or website designer has their own specific roles. The main roles of a website designer (graphics artist) are to plan, analyze and then design a visual answer to a communication problem. Meaning they will create and illustrate in a form of graphics to deliver information or messages through visual form.
There are many ways the website designer or graphics artist can deliver the messages. Normally, they will decide the best format that can be done to deliver the news. It is up to them how they get the message across, and it can either be through the use of print, film or some form of electronic media using various different methods. The methods that they will use in order to convey this message will be through the use of type, photography, animation, illustration, color and certain print and layout methods. In today trends, website is one of the best and easiest methods to deliver company messages or information to the world.
Every website designer or website designer has their own specific roles. The main roles of a website designer (graphics artist) are to plan, analyze and then design a visual answer to a communication problem. Meaning they will create and illustrate in a form of graphics to deliver information or messages through visual form.
There are many ways the website designer or graphics artist can deliver the messages. Normally, they will decide the best format that can be done to deliver the news. It is up to them how they get the message across, and it can either be through the use of print, film or some form of electronic media using various different methods. The methods that they will use in order to convey this message will be through the use of type, photography, animation, illustration, color and certain print and layout methods. In today trends, website is one of the best and easiest methods to deliver company messages or information to the world.
There are few processes involves when designing and developing a website design. When developing a design for their clients, a website designer will look at several different factors in order to plan and execute their design at their target audience. The factors that they will take into consideration in order to achieve this include the following:-
1.Cognitive
2. Cultural
3. Physical
4. Social
Many website designers today will now use a wide range of graphics and layout software in order to help them produce their designs. Certainly, when it comes to producing designs for web pages or other forms of interactive media, then this website designer will use computer animation and programming packages in order to develop and produce a design for their clients.
What are the challenges facing you in performing the role?
• Identification of the origin of the visitor is required.
Identification of the Origin of the Visitor Web is the most anonymous thing on the earth and the web site visitors want to be anonymous. It is a great challenge to discover the personalities of these anonymous visitors based on their behavior during the time they interact with your web site, and capturing enough information to do so without infringing into their privacy.
• Calculation of the “Dwell” time for a content page.
The time spent by the visitor on a particular page provides a good measure showing the interests of the visitor. Direct ways are not available to calculate the dwell time of a visitor on a page.
• Identification of a User-Session.
A visitor can be characterized by studying his browsing behavior in a session, which is a collection of web based transactions related by time. Computing the start and end of a session is a complex process.
• Managing E-commerce Website Structure Information:
Information Web sites may serve static or dynamic pages or a combination of both and each page served may contain or have links to different types of files or documents, images, multimedia, embedded scripts, etc. Pages can be static html documents or can just consist of a template and an Application Server can serve the content for the different components of the template. The type of files served may change frequently. Many new pages can be added on a daily or weekly basis and the old pages may be superseded. According to its purpose, the files may have a classification like Company information, Product catalogue, Technical support, Ordering page, etc. Content pages may have page titles, which will be required for analysis and it should be extracted and loaded to page dimensions.
How will you address these challenges?
Challenge 1:
Identification of the Origin of the Visitor Web is the most anonymous thing on the earth and the web site visitors want to be anonymous. It is a great challenge to discover the personalities of these anonymous visitors based on their behavior during the time they interact with your web site, and capturing enough information to do so without infringing into their privacy. There are four levels in which a user can be identified.
o Based on Visitor's IP Address
o A persistent identifier for that session only
o A persistent identifier that lets you know the same web browser on a particular computer has returned for a repeat session
o A persistent identifier that lets know the particular human being has returned to our web site
Based on the Visitor's IP address gets the country rather than the person name.
It is better to know at least the country of the visitor instead of anonymity. Knowing the country of the visitor provides with opportunities to personalize the web site for his needs as well in gaining the browsing behavior of the person with respect to the local time of the user.
The IP addresses are allocated dynamically by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to their customers. The IP address is not the unique way to identify a web site visitor. There are databases maintained for each part of the globe which gives the country, contact person of the ISP, his mail-id, phone number, fax number, IP address allocating authority and the route to the IP address etc. This helps to identify the part of the globe from which the visitor is originating.
A persistent identifier for that session only can be passed through URLs, hidden fields or session identifiers. This will help avoid the problem of proxy servers. But only current session can be recorded No way of tracking repeat visits and the browser Caching. Clicking of the back button is not recorded in the web server log. This makes it impossible to have a complete map of user’s actions. A possible solution for this could be the use of No-Cache tags in the HTML content
A persistent identifier that lets know the same web browser on a particular computer has returned for a repeat session can be implemented through persistent cookies stored on the client machine. The cookie is a record placed on a user's PC by a web browser in response to a request from a web server. The cookie contents are specified by the web server and can only be read from the domain that has specified the cookie. This provides a way to identify the machine from which the user is accessing the net and not the user. The problems with cookies are that the user might have disabled the cookies. Even if the cookies are enabled the user may delete it at any point of time.
A persistent identifier that lets know the particular human being has returned to the web site is normally implemented via access through user/password. Online forms like registration or preferences for customization are an excellent source to link customers to clicks generated by them. By far, it is the most effective method of gathering visitor information. Online forms also have problems. It is believed that when asked for their name on an Internet form, men will enter a pseudonym 50 percent of the time, and women will use a pseudonym 80 percent of the time. It is not preferable to ask the user to fill in the form while he is visiting the site for the first time, as it can be repulsive.
Challenge 2:
Calculation of Dwell Time Dwell time is the time spent by the visitor on a content page. It is an important measure of the relevance of the content for the user and effectiveness of the page in attracting the visitor. The dwell time can be calculated by finding the difference between the 2 content page requests and subtracting the time required to load the content page and the ancillary files from the value. But the time required to load streaming media files like real audio and mpeg may not be considered for the dwell time computation. In this case, the dwell time is to be computed using the beginning of the streaming media download regardless of whether the rest of the content if fully downloaded.
Challenge 3:
Identification of User Session The start and end of a user session is to be identified in order to analyze the user behavior in a session as well as for measuring the effectiveness of the design of the web site in keeping the visitor for more time in the site. This also helps in identifying the various entry pages through which a visitor enters the web site.
These pages by providing links to other pages and putting appropriate ad-banners in the pages depending upon the context. Any page in a web site can be the entry page for a visitor as key word search in search engines can lead the visitor to any page in the web site. The identification of a session also helps in identifying the most popular exit pages, which could be the session killers. Identifying the session killers and effectively redesigning them may keep the users in the web site for more time. But there is no direct way to identify the start and the end of a user session.
Challenge 4:
Managing E-commerce Website Structure
Information Web sites may serve static or dynamic pages or a combination of both and each page served may contain or have links to different types of files or documents, images, multimedia, embedded scripts, etc. Pages can be static html documents or can just consist of a template and an Application Server can serve the content for the different components of the template. The type of files served may change frequently. Many new pages can be added on a daily or weekly basis and the old pages may be superseded. According to its purpose, the files may have a classification like Company information, Product catalogue, Technical support, Ordering page, etc. Content pages may have page titles, which will be required for analysis and it should be extracted and loaded to page dimensions.
Dynamic pages
Pages can be generated and served dynamically based on the parameters given by the visitor in a previous page. A dynamic page can consist of a template with different components and the content for each component can be generated dynamically based on a given set of parameters. The page used will be the same but the content served will be different at different instances of time. Storing all the instances of the dynamic page will drastically increase the size of the page dimension.
Main Challenges
Building a successful data warehouse itself is a challenging task and building a data mining model on the data poses lots of challenges, starting from the understanding of the business problem, data preparation to the building and deploying the mining model. Web poses specific challenges in terms of cleaning, transforming and loading the data for the purpose of analysis, as normally 90% of the click-stream data is of not much importance from analytic perspective.
References:
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-e-commerce.htm
http://www.ecommercewebdesign.ca/understand-the-role-of-the-website-designer.html
http://www.abbacustechnologies.co.uk/website-designer-manchester-uk-e-commerce-solution/
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1 comments:
I have a hard time describing my thoughts on content, but I really felt I should here. Your article is really great. I like the way you wrote this information.
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