Papers in PDF format

While this approach makes sense it is not necessarily the most intuitive way for an Aria
user to view the data. For example if one is looking at the browsers who hit a website, is it
intuitive for a user to see numbers like
Browser Number
Mosaic 345984
Netscape 1.1 235987
Netscape 2.0 123004
Spyglass 320008
Moreover, is the daily aggregation of the data about browsers a useful statistic? Is that the
correct time granularity? The traffic on the web is inherently dynamic, and the web site
itself is constantly changing in terms of content and interest level. The aria.reporter solves
the problem of intuitively presenting the data by displaying the information in graphical
form, using pie graphs, bar charts, histograms and time-series wave graphs. Moreover, by
presenting the graphs in three dimensional perspective, end users can view the data
spatially and measure relative size. The idea of measuring data multidimensionally, i.e.
relative to other data is a key implementation of the aria.reporter; website activity data
only makes sense in relative terms, not in absolute terms.
Another key implementation of the aria.reporter is one of presenting the data through
relative time graphs, so that users can see not only how the data compares relative to one
another (slice and dice), but also how the data changes over various time periods (drill
down). Using graphs in addition to tabular reports, aria.reporter is able to make more
sense of the data.
The user interface of the aria.reporter allows decision makers to access the information
quickly. Web architecture is inherently object-oriented. Fundamentally the web is
comprised of many distributed nodes (objects) sending requests and responses to each
other. The web’s dynamic nature requires a more sophisticated logging facility that can
adapt over time. Persistent storage must be able to handle evolving schemas to keep up
with people’s changing perceptions. Andromedia stores this information in an object
database which makes the retrieval of information easy and flexible. Through an HTML
interface, end users select the filtering mechanism of the objects they are interested in (i.e.
visits, statistics, bandwidth etc.) and the information is pulled out of the database. The
flexibility derives from the fact that through this HTML user interface, users create
graphical reports on the objects that they want by filtering on the encapsulated data
members.
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The Aria Architecture Page 23 Andromedia, Inc.
White Paper July 1996