[Dspace-general] Week 2: Statistics

[Mark H. Wood]

One thing to keep in mind about whole-site statistical tables is that
there are already tools to do this for web sites in general, such as
AWStats or Webalizer or whatever your favorite may be.  We probably
should not spend effort to try to duplicate those.

Another consideration is that there are stat.s which would be useful
anytime, and stat.s that you dream up once and may never use again, or
may only find interesting at irregular intervals.  So I think we
should be careful not to try to do too much ourselves.  We can have
some generally-useful stuff built in, but we also need ways to expose
the raw cases in a useful form for ad-hoc analysis with
general-purpose statistical tools (SPSS/BMD/SAS/Stata/R/whatever).

Stuff to be inserted as one component of e.g. an item page probably
needs to be built in.  Stuff that would be a page on its own should
perhaps not be part of DSpace at all, but rather something we make
easy to do with other tools.

We need to keep clearly in mind the distinction between capturing raw
cases (someone fetched a bitstream) and abstracting useful patterns
from the collected cases (frequency histogram of this collection's
fetches over time, last month's fetches broken down by nation of
origin).

What might be helpful is to provide some views or stored procedures
that stat. tools could use to classify observations.  Such tools
usually have good facilities for poking around in databases, but could
perhaps use help in getting the information they need without having to
understand (and track changes to!) the fulness of DSpace's schema.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

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