Abstract
Tracking individual web sessions provides valuable information about user behavior. This information can be used for general purpose evaluation of web-based user interfaces to biomedical information systems. To this end, we have developed Lamprey, a tool for doing quantitative and qualitative analysis of Web-based user interfaces. Lamprey can be used from any conforming browser, and does not require modification of server or client software. By rerouting WWW navigation through a centralized filter, Lamprey collects the sequence and timing of hyperlinks used by individual users to move through the web. Instead of providing marginal statistics, it retains the full information required to recreate a user session. We have built Lamprey as a standard Common Gateway Interface (CGI) that works with all standard WWW browsers and servers. In this paper, we describe Lamprey and provide a short demonstration of this approach for evaluating web usage patterns.
Full text
PDFSelected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Buhle E. L., Jr, Goldwein J. W., Benjamin I. OncoLink: a multimedia oncology information resource on the Internet. Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1994:103–107. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Detmer W. M., Shortliffe E. H. A model of clinical query management that supports integration of biomedical information over the World Wide Web. Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1995:898–902. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Fowler J., Kouramajian V., Maram S., Devadhar V. Automated MeSH indexing of the World-Wide Web. Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1995:893–897. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]