Report on the ISPRS home page

The Internet (http - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) address of the ISPRS web server is www.geod.ethz.ch/isprs. This web server was established at ETH Zurich in 1994 and acts as the official ISPRS web server since January 1996. In January 1998 there were 205 different HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) documents with about 52,000 lines of information available on the ISPRS server. These documents are assigned to the following major topics and on the server side to the directories:

• The society (including objectives and activities, historical background);
• Management structure (including organization, officers, finances);
• Legislative documents (including statutes, bylaws, manual of operation of ISPRS Technical Commission and Working Groups (Orange Book), guidelines, awards, minutes of council meetings);
• Members (including ordinary members, associate members, regional members, sustaining members, honorary members and application forms for the different types of members);
• Technical Commissions and Working Groups;
• Publications (including International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, ISPRS Highlights, ISPRS Annual Reports, ISPRS Organization and Programs (Silver Book), ISPRS Member List (Blue Book));
• Interorganizational activities;
• Congress (including preliminary announcement for the ISPRS Congress 2000 in Amsterdam);
• ISPRS events calendar;
• More pointers to ISPRS activities and organizations related to ISPRS.

The update of these documents is organized on four different levels:

• documents that need only an update when the information changes (eg. addresses of members),
• documents that are replaced in long term periods (eg. statutes, information on technical commissions),
• documents that are added to the server (eg. highlights, annual report, minutes of council meetings), and
• documents that need an update in short term periods (eg. ISPRS events calendar).

Beside these documents with information about ISPRS and its activities, there are three additional documents for the convenience of the user:

• a section with a chronological list of the most recent changes on the ISPRS server;
• a search tool for the ISPRS web site, which enables the user to search for topics and/or words in all documents on the ISPRS web server;
• a feedback form for comments or requests.

In the year 1997 (January to December) a total number of 48,778 requests of HTML documents from 9,133 unique hosts (~ users) were registered on the ISPRS web server. This is an average of about 4,060 requests per month, 134 requests per day or one request every 10 minutes.

This statistic gives a reasonable estimate for the use of the ISPRS web server, as it counts only requests for single HTML documents and not all requests answered by the HTTP protocol. Thus the requests for inlined images, graphics, icons etc. are not taken into account, which makes it most likely to estimate the "real" amount of requests on the ISPRS server. In addition, the statistic refers only to the requests made from outside the ethz.ch domain, which excludes all the local traffic on the ISPRS server, eg. during maintenance of the documents.

A monthly statistic for the use of the ISPRS server has been available since January 1995, during which time, there has been an increase in the use of HTML documents on the ISPRS server. A peak in 1996 coincidenced with the ISPRS congress in Vienna. At the present time the ISPRS server has about 5,000 visitors per month, and every week there are about 200 new hosts (~ new users) requesting information.

Andre Streilein (ISPRS Webmaster)