Quarterly Technical Report

January to March 2005

Introduction

At the end of March 2005, there were 25 repositories within the ASDD with a total of 39,373 dataset descriptions available for searching. Statistics are provided for the ASDD covering:

• web access statistics,
• gateway statistics,
• number of records at each repository,
• reliability of repository,

for the months of January, February and March 2005.

Repositories which have provided descriptions are also listed.

Achievements during past quarter

• New web analysis software, Sawmill 7, has been used to generate the web statistics for this quarter. Differences between these web statistics and last quarter are:
  • The visiting countries can be estimated,
  • More spiders or robots have been eliminated from the web statistics, and
  • More reliable averages are calculated.
• The RELAX NG eXtensible Schema Definition (XSD)was released for content checking of anzmeta-1.3.dtd XML metadata records. The ASDD validation tool uses this XSD when validating anzmeta-1.3.dtd XML document instances. Anyone can download the RELAX NG XSD and use a 100% XML compliant validator to check their own metadata records.
• Except for one node all of the ASDD nodes appear to be responding properly to the ASDD advanced search queries except in the case of badly formed metadata records.
• There are more basic and advanced searches this quarter than last quarter.
• There are more visitors and less accesses to the ASDD this quarter than last quarter. However, more robots or spiders have been eliminated this quarter by the new Sawmill 7 software. If the page views of these were added to this quarter's web statistics then there would be more accesses this quarter than last.
• Some Z39.50 search errors may be caused by poor metadata content. Some metadata discrepancies are highlighted in the advanced results report.
• Congratulations to; ACT Geographic Data Directory, BRS and Australian Natural Resources Data Library (ANRDL), Bureau of Meteorology, DEH Environmental Data Directory (Green Pages), Geoscience Australia, IndexGeo Pty Ltd - Eco Companion catalogue, South Australian Spatial Information Directory and Victorian Spatial Data Directory for being available 99% of the time.
• Congratulations to; ACT Geographic Data Directory, Australian Hydrographic Office - Product Metadata, Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia, IndexGeo Pty Ltd - Eco Companion catalogue, NSW Natural Resources Data Directory, Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines Spatial Data, WALIS Interragator-Aerial Photography, and WALIS Interragator-Environmental Impact Statements for having 100% valid ANZLIC Version 2 metadata.
• On the 14th March 2005 Geoscience Australia's Internet Service Provider's connection to the internet was down from 2:34pm - 6:09pm. This would have prevented web users from accessing the ASDD gateways and web pages as well as the ASDD gateway's access to the ASDD nodes. A contingency plan is being implemented to mitigate these problems.

Web Statistics for ASDD

This quarter's statistics for the ASDD are available for the period 2005-01-01 to 2005-03-31.

Note: These results are less than last quarter but another spider, msnbot.msn.com, has been removed from these web statistics. The number of web page accesses for this spider for last quarter was about 12,000. If these web page accesses are taken into consideration then the number of web page accesses for this quarter would be about 8,000 more than last quarter.

A summary of this quarter's statistics follows:

Notes:

• There are less page views this quarter. However, the msnbot.msn.com registered approximately 11,000 page views last quarter. If this was included for this quarter then there would be more page views than last quarter.
• There are more visitors than the previous quarter.

The following diagrams show the statistical trends for the last 13 quarters:

More statistical details are available for:

• Top Spiders
• Top 20 Pages
• Top Visiting Countries
• Top 20 Visitor Domains
• Top Australian Visitor Domains
• Top 20 Australian Government Visitor Domains

Gateway Usage

The following statistics are a summary of the ASDD basic and ASDD advanced gateways:

ASDD Basic Gateway

• 2245 searches were made through the ASDD basic gateway.
• 1297 single search terms were used.
• 948 multiple search terms were used.

The following links provide more details on the monthly basic gateway statistics:

• Basic gateway January 2005
• Basic gateway February 2005
• Basic gateway March 2005

ASDD Advanced Gateway

• 2105 searches were made through the ASDD advanced gateway.
• 1195 single search terms were used.
• 910 multiple search terms were used.

The following links provide more details on the monthly advanced gateway statistics:

• Advanced gateway January 2005
• Advanced gateway February 2005
• Advanced gateway March 2005

Repository Records

The following table lists the repositories, the DTD used, the number of records parsed per repository and the number of XML records that validated sometime during January 2005.

Note:

• These results take a long time to generate and may show different numbers to those of the monthly accesses. This could be due to nodes adding metadata to their repositories, some repositories not properly responding to the Z39.50 queries or not having records available in XML format.
• 90% of the ASDD records were available in XML format for validation. This is less than last quarter.
• 96% of XML records that were parsed are valid.
• 12 repositories have 100% valid records, which is more than last quarter. However, many of the XML errors are minor and can be easily fixed. There are some hypertext links to the node's reports for those that have XML parsing errors.
• 17 repositories are using or partially using ANZMETA-1.3.DTD or it's extension, which is the same as the last quarter.
• Some nodes just need to convert their & to the entity character reference equivalents.
• "Not available" means that the server did not respond appropriately to the query at the time of investigation.
• "None" means that no DTD was provided in the XML records or no XML records were available. This is not a Z39.50 problem it is a processing problem.

Repository Reliability

A summary of repository reliability for the period January to March 2005 is given below:

Monthly details about the server, port, database, available records query time and repository availability can be found at:

January
February
March

Repository managers are automatically notified by email if a server goes down for a period longer than four hours.

Repository descriptions

ASDD repository descriptions http://asdd.ga.gov.au/asdd/tech/node/

It is the responsibility of each repository manager to utilise the online document management application to describe their repository and update the repository description whenever they choose.

The following ASDD repositories are briefly described and include references to further information ...

• ACT Geographic Data Directory
• Australian Antarctic Data Centre
• Australian Hydrographic Office - Product Metadata
• Australian Hydrographic Office - Source Metadata
• BRS and Australian Natural Resources Data Library (ANRDL)
• Bureau of Meteorology
• CSIRO Marine Research
• DEH Environmental Data Directory (Green Pages)
• Geoscience Australia
• IndexGeo Pty Ltd - Eco Companion catalogue
• National Oceans Office
• NSW Natural Resources Data Directory
• NT Spatial Data Directory
• Other Commonwealth Agencies (hosted by BRS)
• Qld Spatial Data (QSIIS)
• Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines Spatial Data
• RAN Directorate of Oceanography and Meteorology
• South Australian Spatial Information Directory
• Tasmanian Spatial Data Directory
• Victorian Spatial Data Directory
• WALIS Interragator-Aerial photography
• WALIS Interragator-Environmental Impact Statements
• WALIS Interragator-Bibliographic Data
• WALIS Interragator-Natural Resource Monitoring
• WALIS Interragator-Spatial Data