Altmetrics Integration

Our goal at KnowledgeArc has been to provide low-cost archives that are fast, reliable, scalable and easy to maintain and with the recent deployment of our new containerized archives we continue to achieve what we set out to do.

Solutions for archiving (and for many other web application hosting solutions) fall into two groups; archives are either deployed to shared equipment or are installed individually on dedicated resources. In the case of a shared hosting solution, your archive is at the mercy of other archives and the server as a whole; if one of the other archives requires a restart or corrupts the system for any reason, your archive is affected. In the case of dedicated resources, you have the luxury of isolating your archive from others but in turn this increases costs, including set up (you need a full stack of software to be installed to run your archive), performance (even paying month to month for a cloud-based solution can add up), and maintenance (these systems don’t upgrade themselves).

Additionally, in the case of cloud-based solutions, scaling requires complex installations, and many will only scale horizontally, meaning more servers are deployed automatically if performance is dropping. Also, many of these autoscaling solutions are poorly implemented, resulting in spikes in costs and manual intervention to “kill off” unnecessary resources.

Getting a picture of what people are viewing, downloading and searching for greatly improves your ability to tailor your archive to the needs of your users. However, current implementations are limited; you either have to incur (often steep) initial costs to license enhanced because out-of-the-box statistics are limited to raw or very basic output or you need to sign up for a cloud service such as Google Analytics, meaning you give up ownership of your data to another organization and are tied to their platform as well as their user agreement.

We aim to solve both these problems with KnowledgeArc Analytics, powered by the open source Piwik analytics system. Piwik provides comprehensive capture and graphing of your archive’s usage statistics but you don’t have to hand over your data to use it; you own the data your capture. What’s even better is that because Piwik is open source, you own the analytics application as well so you can deploy it wherever you like. Piwik also has a powerful programming interface so you can extend your analytics any way you wish.