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| What are Web Services? |
Web services are special Web resources that can interact
with a variety of Web-capable clients, including human
users, mobile devices, e-business portals and so on. They
process service requests, respond with messages, aggregate
server resources, and serve as building blocks for other
computer applications. They represent the vision of a
"programmable Web" as well as the industry standards
and cutting-edge technologies for delivering this new generation
of interactive Web.
As new technologies, Web services provide the City of
Wichita an opportunity in bringing citizens services that were
previously unavailable. We share the vision, and it is our focus
to "open the doors"
to provide convenient and reliable access to City information 24
hours a day 7 days a week.
With support of open industry standards and software companies such as
Microsoft,
Sun Microsystems,
IBM, Web services are become a mainstream
building architecture for next-generation software applications.
Visit their Web sites for more information.
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When I tried to print a search result page, I found the
right edge of the page was cut off on letter-sized paper.
Is there any way to print the entire Web page?
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You have at least four methods
to work around the problem:
(1) Click the Printer-Friendly link on the left menu list;
(2) Or change the font on your Web pages to a smaller size;
(3) Or change the page orientation from Portrait to
Landscape through Page Setup before printing;
(4) Or copy the interested content, paste it into your favorite HTML-aware word
processor (such as Microsoft Word 2000), and edit it before printing.
If all of the above methods have "failed" to meet your needs, please contact
us, and we'd be glad to help you out.
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| What format should I use when entering a date? |
| You may virtually use any valid
date format acceptable in the United States. For example, "2/1/2001",
"February 1, 2001", "02/01/01", and "2-1-01"
are equally valid and are understood as February 1, 2001. Additionally,
date data such as "2001-2-1", "2001/2/1" are also interpreted as February 1, 2001.
If your input date is in the current year, you may even omit the year.
For example, if the current year is 2001 and you have entered "2/1" in a date field
of any Web service form, "2/1" will also be interpreted as February 1, 2001.
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| How to navigate through tables that contain multiple pages of search results? |
Two features are designed to make navigation through large result sets easy:
Clickable table headers. You can point your mouse cursor to
any table header, and if the header is clickable, you can click it to
re-sort the result set by that header. For example, if there is a clickable
header named "DATE", you can click it any time and sort results by date.
Fast navigation buttons (
 ,
 ,
 and
 ).
Up to eight arrow buttons may be placed at the four corners of any table that cannot fit
in a single page. You can click on any such button to navigate to the start,
previous, next, or end page.
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| What Web browsers are compatible with the Web services you provide?
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The current Web design supports today's most popular Web browsers,
including Internet Explorer (MSIE) 5.x and 6.x, Netscape Navigator 4.x and 6.x,
and Opera 5.x. MSIE Version 5.5 or above is highly recommended.
Some of the Web page features are available only to a latest version of MSIE.
And with MSIE 5.5, 6.0 or later, a pleasant experience is almost guaranteed.
If you do not have or use MSIE 5.5 or later, Opera 5.x (downloadable for free
here) is preferred over any version
of Netscape Navigator. Opera is very small, yet extremely fast,
flexible, and powerful.
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| How to use Full Site Search? |
1. How to use the search service.
You do not need to read on. Just try yourself!
(1) This search service is very easy to use,
though it's so powerful
that it offers so many "intimidating" options to choose from.
(2) A keyword is a group of words, which by itself may be a word, phrase
or even complete sentence.
Remember to always separate multiple keywords by comma (comma-delimit).
(3) Affixed to a keyword, the asterisk (*) becomes a wildcard. For example,
'Smith*' represents any of 'Smith', 'Smiths', 'Smithson',
'Smithsonian' and so on.
(4) Best matches may not be good matches. To narrow down search results,
always use a combination of keywords, phrases, date ranges and other criteria.
(5) The search is always case-insensitive.
2. Ignored words. The most frequently used English
words may, if entered as keywords, cause the search engine to reject
an otherwise valid search request. Such words include a, an, the, you,
this, that, or, under, in, etc. If you receive a message regarding ignored
words, simply try again using different words.
3. Search results.
If a document does not have an identifiable title, its title
is shown using its Internet location (URL).
If a document title starts with non-printable characters, their
spaces are replaced one on one with underscores.
If a document does not have an identifiable section of contents,
its preview is not shown.
The timestamp of a document uses Central Standard Time adjusted with Daylight Saving.
4. PDF documents. The search engine
does not search the contents of PDF documents. So, keyword search does not
apply to PDF documents. However, they can be searched for by date or document name.
5. Search scope. The search engine searches
only static public information on the Web sites hosted by the City Web servers.
Dynamic Web pages, such as the Web services, are beyond the scope.
6. Below are two examples of how to use Full Site Search.
Example of a simple search. You want to find out how many Web pages were
changed on a particular date, say, 2/14/2001. Do this: set the document last modified
date range from 2/14/01 to 2/14/01, set the document type to Web Pages,
hit the Search button, and read
the total number of results.
Example of a complex search. You want to print a list of
City Council minutes documents posted during 2000-2001 that contain the keywords
'Bob Knight', 'Mayor' and some word starting with 'Mexic'
(which may be Mexican, Mexico, a typo like Mexicco, etc).
Do this: set the document date range from 1/1/00 to 12/31/01,
enter Bob Knight, Mayor, Mexic*, MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF THE CITY COUNCIL
in the 'document must contain all of' field,
enter m in the 'document name must contain' field,
set results per page to 100, and (optionally) set Web site to
City of Wichita Web Site. Then, click the Search button.
After seeing the results show up, click Printer-Friendly on the left pane, and print
the final page (if the Web browser does not print background colors,
you will need to enable support for background color printing).
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| I found quite a few bizarre date values, e.g., 07/08/0200 and 04/03/3001.
Have you guys ever lived at those times? |
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All these are plain errors
in the internal database system. The software built on top of those
databases used to adopt the American standard short date format: MMDDYY.
In this format, a date such as "07/08/0200" and "07/08/2000"
will always show up as "07/08/00". However, we use a four-digit year
format, so the hidden errors like "07/08/0200" are now uncovered.
We are aware of such errors, but are unable to correct them ourselves.
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How to use Web Traffic Analysis's Report Generator?
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This Web service in its entirety (you only see
its online version) is a powerful tool for detecting trends, patterns as well
as abnormal behaviors of the traffic on the City Web sites. To use it, simply
enter your specific criteria (almost any combination is acceptable) in
the entry form, and then click on the Generate Report button. However,
there are a few things as listed below that you need to know
to correctly use the tool and understand the generated reports.
• This Web service only reports on the
City Web traffic that occurred between January 2001 and the day before
its online statistics are last updated. Note that
online access to a very small number of them is restricted to internal users.
• A Web page is poor at showing multiple reports
all at once while trying to keep different Web browsers happy.
Since this Web service uses the same reporting tools as used by our other Web services,
you may need to play with it a while in order to be able to get the right reports
you want.
• To have a clear and correct understanding of
what all the statistical numbers mean, you have to carefully read and
understand the verbose description of every report. Any such report
without the description or equivalent is meaningless.
• If anyhow a report cannot be
generated based on your selected options, the Web service will
ignore your choice of rows or columns.
• The unit of all the statistical numbers is visit.
A visit is defined as one presentation (successful or not) of a Web site item
(existent or not) to a Web client requesting the item.
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| Are the Web Traffic Statistical Reports useful? |
By using this Web traffic analysis and reporting tool, we can
trace how many Web devices (Web browsers and other Internet programs) have come to
which of our Web sites, from what IP addresses, hitting what Web pages,
getting what kinds of results such as "Success", "Access
Denied" or "File Not Found", etc.
This Web service in its entirety (you only see
its online portion) is a powerful tool for detecting trends, patterns as well
as abnormal behaviors of the traffic to the City Web sites.
It is designed to track down Web traffic in great detail, and is capable of
delineating Web traffic details to the accuracy of the hour.
Below are some of its current uses:
• It helps us discover what Web pages or documents
on our Web sites are more popular, and what Web pages or documents
have no or very few visitors. With this information, we can improve our Web sites
based on user preferences.
• It helps us find out what Web pages on our Web sites
may cause problems when accessed on the Internet, as well as whether or not
there exist bad links to our sites and, if so, where they are.
• It helps us detect almost any abnormal behaviors of
the Web traffic to decide whether our Web sites were under security attack
and, if so, when and how.
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