Parliament's Web site to get scrutiny

The department responsible for providing services to the Australian Parliament in Canberra will soon step up its efforts to track usage patterns regarding the Parliament's popular Web site.

The site currently contains around 28GB of data held in some 150,000 files, according to tender documents released today by the Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS). Most of those documents are in HTML, Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format, although the site is also used for live video of parliamentary proceedings, for example.

The site attracts some 86 million page views annually, giving the Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard Web servers it runs on plenty of work to do.

In the documents, the department said it wished to improve its understanding of that site (including "volumes and patterns of user behaviour"), as well as other sites running within the parliamentary Intranet.

DPS has consequently gone to market for Web usage monitoring software.

"DPS currently uses WebTrends (version 6.5) as its Web usage monitoring product. This version is no longer supported by the vendor and, at least in its current configuration, is not able to meet all of the reporting requirements of the parliamentary departments," the documents said.

The department will select a vendor for the project in November, with the product to be installed and configured by early December.

The parliament's move to more closely understand user behaviour on its Web sites comes as the AFR newspaper this week revealed welfare agency Centrelink had routinely captured and stored information about user behaviour on its Web sites over the last four years.

The agency reportedly uses Vignette's Web Capture technology to log users' moves, with Centrelink online architect Phil Wilson saying the project aided in collecting evidence of online transactions.