BaBar - A Community Web Site in an Organizational Setting

TL;DR

This paper examines the management and development challenges of the BABAR community Web site at SLAC, highlighting the application of Web Engineering methods to improve understanding and strategy in a complex organizational setting.

Contribution

It presents the first application of Web Engineering methods to a community Web site within a semi-governmental organization, developing user and information models.

Findings

Explicit user and information models of the BABAR community

Identification of organizational and policy constraints

A strategy for periodic review of community Web sites

Abstract

The BABAR Web site was established in 1993 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) to support the BABAR experiment, to report its results, and to facilitate communication among its scientific and engineering collaborators, currently numbering about 600 individuals from 75 collaborating institutions in 10 countries. The BABAR Web site is, therefore, a community Web site. At the same time it is hosted at SLAC and funded by agencies that demand adherence to policies decided under different priorities. Additionally, the BABAR Web administrators deal with the problems that arise during the course of managing users, content, policies, standards, and changing technologies. Desired solutions to some of these problems may be incompatible with the overall administration of the SLAC Web sites and/or the SLAC policies and concerns. There are thus different perspectives of the same Web site and differing expectations in segments of the SLAC population which act as constraints and challenges in any review or re-engineering activities. Web Engineering, which post-dates the BABAR Web, has aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of Web development. This paper reports on the first part of a recent review of application of Web Engineering methods to the BABAR Web site, which has led to explicit user and information models of the BABAR community and how SLAC and the BABAR community relate and react to each other. The paper identifies the issues of a community Web site in a hierarchical, semi-governmental sector and formulates a strategy for periodic reviews of BABAR and similar sites.