Novel cloud service for improving world universities ranking

The Internet has emerged to be an effective platform for world universities to share their academic outcomes and to show their influence and contribution via constructing rich and easy-to-access web sites. At the same time, Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (WR), proposed by Centre for Scientific Information and Documentation (CSIC), ranks the world universities by the quantity of digital documents available on their web sites and the quality of the web pages measured by the incoming hyperlinks. Therefore, WR is currently recognized as an important index and opportunity for universities willing to promote themselves by the Internet technology. In this paper, we propose a novel cloud-based information providing system for Webometrics Rankings which employs web mining techniques to gather the WR indices from the Internet automatically, and provides useful information in real time for the managers of university web sites. The proposed system is deployed on Microsoft Azure cloud platform in order to give up-to-data and deeper insights of the WR ranking indicators for its users. It utilizes the scalable computation and storage capability of the cloud platform to continually gather the WR index data from the Internet. The proposed system is designed with architecture suitable for cloud-based application such that the period to thoroughly update the WR ranking data is shortened from six months to be within one week. The proposed service model provides a paradigm for constructing cloud-based service of information providing applications.