NIST WEB METRICS TESTBED RELEASED.

A new NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Washington, DC, www.nist.gov) The standards-defining agency of the U.S. government, formerly the National Bureau of Standards. It is one of three agencies that fall under the Technology Administration (www.technology. Web Metrics Testbed has been released. Release 2.0 includes enhancements to existing tools, Windows versions See Windows. , and new prototypes. The Web Metrics Testbed project focuses on experimenting with innovative tools to help with rapid, remote, and automated usability testing and evaluation of web sites. The testbed is designed to help usability engineers evaluate and improve the usability of their web sites. Collaboration with industry and academia continues to be an important part of the development of the testbed.

Available for downloading at http://www.nist.gov/webmetrics, NIST Web Metrics Testbed, Release 2.0, includes the following enhancements:

* Web Static Analyzer Tool (WebSAT 2.0), which checks web page HTML HTML
in full HyperText Markup Language

Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. against typical usability guidelines;

* Web Category Analysis Tool (WebCAT 1.1), which allows the usability engineer to construct and conduct a web category analysis;

* Web Variable Instrumenter Program (WebVIP 2.0), which instruments a web site to capture a log of user interaction;

* Framework for Logging Usability Data (FLUD FLUD Framework for Logging Usability Data 1.0), which provides a file format and parser A routine that analyzes a continuous flow of text-based input and breaks it into its constituent parts. See parse.

(language) parser - An algorithm or program to determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or string of symbols in some language. for representation of user interaction logs; and

* VisVIP Tool (VisVIP 2.0), which includes 3D visualizations of user navigation paths through a web site.

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Title Annotation:	National Institute of Standards and Technology
Publication:	Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
Article Type:	Brief Article
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	May 1, 2001
Words:	195
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