WebRUM: A Model for Measuring Web-Wide Resource Usage |
Web resource usage statistics enable server owners to monitor how their users use their web sites, and for
Evans MP, Furnell SM
advertisers to monitor how often their advertisements are viewed. However, there is currently no way to
measure how web resources are used across the whole web. The problems of capturing the required information
and providing acceptable system performance present significant hurdles to the development of such a system.
Overcoming these hurdles, though, would lead to a web service that could reveal the changing interests of
society, and provide deep insights into the changing nature of the web, not to mention the value it would have as
a marketing tool. As such, we have developed a model, called WebRUM, which can overcome these hurdles by
extending a resource migration mechanism that we have previously designed. The paper describes the
mechanism, and shows how it can be extended to measure web-wide resource usage. The information stored by
the model is defined, and the performance of a prototype mechanism is presented to demonstrate the
effectiveness of the design.