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How to Choose the Right Web Development Partner
How to choose the right IT Company? If you are concerned about any such issues and are hunting for answers then go on and read the entire stuff. With rising needs of web development industry, it becomes imperative to choose the right partner for a successful project. The choice of partner will very much impact the overall delivery and implementation for your online presence on World Wide Web. Some people just pick a partner from one of the first few people who contact them while others make their selection based on the prices offered to them from various companies/individuals. What people most often do not consider is the ability and past delivery record of their partner. What's most important is not just to see the project happen on papers, but to visualize it happen in real in the given conditions. For how long has the partner been into business? Have they dealt with any customers in your region/area? Does your partner have the capability to deliver what you are looking for? Does the partner have technical competence to warn you about any potential flaws or problems that can crop up at a later stage? Does your partner take care of quality and minor details to bring in professionalism in work? Has the partner done any similar work in past or something which is comparable and equally complex? Are the timelines give to you feasible and will be followed? What happens if deliveries are not made on time for your work? Are the prices offered to you feasible and to market standards so as to cover the development costs and build a long term relationship? Is the partner stable and will be in business once your work is done? Is the partner or their associate traceable in case you need them urgently? Has the partner had any satisfied customers in the past for any services they have done? What kind of after sales support will be provided assuming work has been done and delivered? If you get satisfactory answers for at least 80% of the questions above, then I think you are in good hands. Some people will not be able to provide satisfactory answers to most of these questions. If you land up working with them, the project is bound to fail. We suggest you to continue your search in such cases and think twice before starting any sort of work with non-professional partners.
Web Analytics
I've done quite a bit of research into web analytics lately, and I have found a couple of things. Google analytics Is a great tool, but it cannot be the only tool an organization relies on. Because it is a purely JavaScript based, it is unable to catch browsers that do not have JavaScript enabled, this includes the search engine robots, some hand held devices, as well as a percent of users that manually turn this off. That being said we need a tool to parse the log files from the server and to give us information about these users, as well as providing us with "on demand" stats where as Google's stats are next day. The server logs also contain a wealth of other information that we are collecting automatically, so we might as well take advantage of it. I have come to the conclusion that we need to use Google Analytics but we also need a tool that reads the server logs. There are quite a variety of tools that would fill this need. Google recently purchased Urchin who's web analysis product runs Google analytics, costs about $3k and will work with the Google Mini, Urchin also gives the ability to read logs from server software other than IIS (like apache, the software used for open source applications) . Urchin will be releasing another version shortly, and this will be the first release since the Google buyout. Another option is WebTrends Analytics it costs about $4k. It Like Urchin will read both IIS and Apache logs, and has a web interface for users. The last product is NetTracker, it runs about $4k for the software, and another grand for support. it was recently bought out by Unica. The administration of netTracker is not the smoothest, and the support seems to have declined on quality since the buy out.
Semantic Web
Introduction Semantic web as defined by the creator of the web Tim Berners-Lee is "a web of data, in some ways like a global database" (Berners-Lee, 1998). To elaborate further Mr. Berners-Lee explains in an interview held by IDG Now, data is expressed on computers as associated files with applications that deal specifically with information, an example would be, data in calendars, bank systems, spreadsheets, and database application. Looking at a web page, data is not clearly defined and not associated with any of the applications usually on computers. Semantic web will allow data to interact and connect together; it will bring on a common data format for all applications, for databases and web pages alike (Moon, 1999). Semantic web is not to build an artificial intelligence system which allows computers to understand what humans write on web pages; on the contrary, it is an attempt to make web pages more understandable and well-defined to support automatic extraction of data from within web content (Berners-Lee, 1998). Analysis The emergence of the web and the way HTML took off was driven by how society's needed to grew, from Internet chat to file transfer to high-end communities through blogs and wiki's. HTML was not limited to web content, knowledge base and help files adapted the language as a format to document software applications and provide training material. The revolution of technologies on the Internet allowed companies like Google to index pages; a thought that was very far away, says Tim Berners-Lee in his lecture at MIT. Web services have evolved to pave the road for distributed information and modular programming allowing interoperability among sites. Through XML, data in one site can be used by another using the common protocols and standards supported by both (Berners-Lee, 1998). XML defines schemas that deal with fields of data, what is required is a system that can tell the computer what sort of information (data) it can derive from within a page (Moon, 1999). With Web 3.0 a site will provide data that can be navigated through and extracted from multiple sites, this is a result of the fact that semantic web data model is closely related to a relational database where records of data share common fields that connect them together (Berners-Lee, 1998). The solution provided to support semantic web is in the form of metadata that describes the data contained on web pages. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a base to manage metadata; it is the ground that computers can use to exchange and interact with applications on the Web (W3C RFC, 1999). The applications for RDF include digital libraries, online catalogs, and indexing systems that are usually associated with content and content relationships models deployed in most web pages. With RDF data within business portals will be analyzed and identified as resources, properties, or statements transparent to the domain, further more, the specifications will merge with other documents to comprise a framework of classes. Classes organized as a hierarchy comprises a schema that can be reusable as metadata definitions along side multiple platforms. Resources created in this hierarchy can be identified using a resource identifier (URI), which enables a document given to a machine with this identification to be recognized by the system and triggers it to dig and find similar data (Berners-Lee, 1998). Implications Semantic web can be the solution to overpower the limitations of current information management systems in finding and extracting data from unorganized resources. RDF is meant to describe any data regardless of its character, location, source, or type, the concept of URI is richer to uniquely identify any object on the web (Berners-Lee, 1998). The pillars of Semantic web are standards and common protocols that are the bases for knowledge representation; HTML, RDF, the data language resource description web ontology language (OWL) that describes to the machine what is going on, in addition to RDF1 which is a query language to make inquiries among machines much easer, will all emerge and collaborate to bring in more to the web and more intelligent programs that will bring the Internet more closer (Cleave, 2004). The current research and implementation of Abilene network and the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Internet 2 of high-performance backbone network linking major universities and research labs across the US, is a good foundation for what Semantic web can do, and represent the perfect platform for grid computing, digital libraries, virtual laboratories, and distance learning (Abilene, Internet2). Internet2 or I2 was developed by a group of universities in 1996 providing improved connectivity standards to reach 10gbps (gigabits per second). With more than 227 universities and libraries connected, network based applications and experimental programs can run on this network of high-bandwidth connection feeding on the latest technology of gigabit Ethernet and IP protocol version 6 (Reardon, 2004). Semantic web standards can be the base of material and data distributed on this network, providing the best test platform to explore the full potential and what can be achieved. Conclusion Tim Berners-Lee believes that with Web 3.0 we can succeed and fantastic things can happen, but the infrastructure need to be built, laws of privacy and security need to be revised and honored, further more, the web need to remain open for researchers to allow for continuous upgrade and development. Semantic web will kick off when individuals materialize the need to work on data processing, and think about collaborating their data, with company's information and that of the government (Moon, 1999). References:
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