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Software Resources for Web Metrics

Download

The various tools within Web Metrics make use of some shared resources. These resources need be downloaded and installed only once to support all the tools.

On your machine, create the standard directory structure for WebMetrics if it does not already exist. Go to our NIST Web Metrics download page to obtain the resource software and store it in $WEB_TOOLS/. You can then delete the original tar file to save room, if desired.

Download procedure:

  1. Download resources.tar.gz to $WEBMET_TOOLS/
  2. Do: gunzip resources.tar.gz (to produce resources.tar)
  3. Do: tar -xvf resources.tar (to generate the resources tree)
  4. There should now be a resources directory with five sub-directories: images/, ogl/, geom/, c-util/, and weblink/.

Images

These files contain images used by your local copy of the tool documentation of WebMetrics, e.g. by files within $WEBMET_TOOLS/WebSAT/doc/.

Graphics
Functions

These files contain C source code used by some of the visualization tools. They are needed only if you plan to install these tools from source code, i.e. by compiling them.

There are three libraries of routines as described below. The higher-level libraries depend on the lower-level ones.

c-util subdirectory
A library of simple low-level utilities for C language programming.
c-*.c
Source code files for the various C functions
defs.h
Function defs for the C utilities
geom subdirectory
A library of basic geometry functions
g-*.c
Source code files for the various geometry functions
defs.h
geometry data and function definitions
meta.h
standard header for geometry functions
ogl subdirectory
A library of functions to facilitate OpenGL programming; uses the geom library
o-*.c
Source code files for the various OpenGL helper functions
char-geom.dat
coordinates for drawing ASCII characters
defs.h
OpenGL data and function definitions
meta.h
standard header for OpenGL helper functions

You must compile these libraries before attempting to compile the visualization tools (e.g. FLUDViz and VisVIP). The following are templates of commands to do this; your system may require additional parameters, etc. 

     cd $WEBMET_TOOLS/resources/c-util
     cc -c -I.. c-*.c
     ar rsvu lib-util.a *.o

     cd $WEBMET_TOOLS/resources/geom
     cc -c -I.. g-*.c
     ar rsvu lib-geom.a *.o

     cd $WEBMET_TOOLS/resources/ogl
     cc -c -I.. o-*.c
     ar rsvu lib-ogl.a *.o

Website
Analysis

This directory contains files pertaining to the analysis of the static link structure of a website. This analysis is required by VisVIP. The analysis takes place in two steps: running Linklint and convert-ll.perl. Please see the page "Analyzing the Website" for a description of how to use these programs.

Linklint

is freely available software, but is not a product of NIST. It must be downloaded from: http://www.linklint.org, [[current??]] not from this site. Linklint has many features and options, but its basic function is to start on a given set of web pages and follow their links to other pages so as to analyze how all the pages of the website are connected.

convert-ll.perl

is a PERL script that analyzes the output of linklint and generates files describing the topology of the website.