MAP Data Centre Status

Hans Hirter, IACETH, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland

MAP Site Map

With the new concept of the MAP Web interface (see MAP newsletter no. 14) the user will reach the data and information area with fewer clicks than before. However, finding the right information on a complex site like the MAP Website is sometimes a time consuming act. With the new site map we hope to improve the score of hits. Figure 1 shows the site map which gives a better overview from the point of the user. The structure of the MAP Web Site itself was not changed.

Figure 1. MAP Site Map.

The MAP Home Page is located in the centre; on the left side is the project information and on the right side is the data area. A line between boxes represents a link from one webpage to the next one. The MAP Site Map in PDF-format can be downloaded from here

MAP Data Centre access statistic

In the last 13 months there was a lot of Internet traffic at MDC. On average, the MDC had 8014 requests per day or 2’905’990 accesses in the last year. Counting the various pages on our site, we got 2’230 requests for pages per day or 808’704 requests for pages per year. Figure 2 shows the monthly traffic in the last year. The average data transfer rate was 184 Mbytes per day or 65’264 Mbytes per year. In November the MDC was contacted by different search engines; in this particular case on the 3rd and 4th . This explains the tremendous difference between “requests” and “requests for pages”. The number of “requests” means the total number of files downloaded from our server (including graphics), and the number of “requests for pages” just counts the various pages on our site.
The number of distinct hosts (the number of different computers from which requests came) was 18’269 hosts. The domain report list contains more than 100 different countries from which files were downloaded. Table 2 shows the top-twenty domains of computers which requested files. If we look at this list a little closer, we find countries all over the world like Israel, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, Peru, Costa Rica…

Figure 2. Monthly Web traffic at MDC in 2001.

Figure 3. HTTP status codes of requests.

The top-two browsers with the largest numbers of requests are Netscape with 409’000 and Internet Explorer with 500’000 requests. It is the first time that Internet Explorer has more request than Netscape. As for the operating systems, we detected 637’000 requests from Windows, 235’000 request from UNIX, and 22’000 request from Macintosh systems. But the major part was an unknown operation system. The operation system of search engines and surfers which access the MDC through a firewall give no information about their operating system. Based on this, we decided to develop our Web interface primarily for Internet Explorer and Netscape and to give up some fancy features and fonts. Despite all efforts there are illegal requests to our site. Figure 3 shows the HTTP status codes. One fact is the problem with invalid addresses in the search engines. Most of the requests ‘Document not found’ came from invalid entries in the different search engines. It is no secret that some public search engines host many old web pages with dead links.

Table 1. Top twenty domains of computers which requested files.

requests	%bytes	domain
1943329	49.08%	.ch (Switzerland)
272275	11.28%	.com (Commercial)
294375	8.69%	.net (Network)
138326	3.34%	.it (Italy)
97954	2.23%	.fr (France)
64978	1.44%	.edu (USA Educational)
54226	0.92%	.at (Austria)
25410	0.61%	.de (Germany)
21057	0.53%	.ca (Canada)
14961	0.36%	.si (Slovenia)
17138	0.34%	.uk (United Kingdom)
9115	0.23%	.es (Spain)
7519	0.17%	.gov (USA Government)
4844	0.13%	.int (International)
4922	0.13%	.se (Sweden)
4027	0.11%	.mil (USA Military)
3837	0.07%	.nl (Netherlands)
2981	0.06%	.be (Belgium)
2818	0.06%	.jp (Japan)
1133	0.04%	.dk (Denmark)