User account

In order for you to be issued with an account, we need to first verify that you are either a staff member or a student at a university. This service is run as part of a research project at the Australian National University and we do not have the resources (money, people) to open up the service to people not associated with a university or similar organisation. Please provide enough information to allow us to easily establish your identity and where you work/study.

If you provide a university email address, your account should be approved very quickly!

Finally, if you are not associated with a university but would like to use the VOSON System, please contact Dr Robert Ackland (robert.ackland@anu.edu.au)

Account information
Your preferred username; punctuation is not allowed except for periods, hyphens, and underscores.
A valid e-mail address. All e-mails from the system will be sent to this address. The e-mail address is not made public and will only be used if you wish to receive a new password or wish to receive certain news or notifications by e-mail.
Apply for role
Personal information
Please state your name.
Please state the university that you are from (note that this selection only shows the universities of people who have already signed up for accounts). If your university is not shown here, please select "Other" and write the name of your organization in the box below.
If your university is not listed above, please state where you research/study here.
Please state your position in the university.
Please state the field in which you research/teach/study. If your field is not shown here, please select "Other" and write your field in the box below.
Please write you field of research/study here (if it is not available in the above select box).
Please state the country where you are currently living (note that this selection only shows the countries of people who have already signed up for accounts). If your country is not available for selection, please select "Other" and then write the name of your country in the box below.
If your country is not listed above, please write it here.
Please state your country of origin here, if different to the country where you currently live.
Please state the reason why you are requesting a VOSON System account. You could just say that you are testing it out, but it would be helpful if you could give some more details about your research purpose. This information will not be made visible to other VOSON System account holders. The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Terms and Conditions (Basic Access Role)
The following are draft terms and conditions of use of the VOSON System for the creation of new web crawl datasets ("voson" databases). The terms are between Robert Ackland and a new user of the VOSON System (the "user") who is being granted privileges allowing the creation of new web crawl datasets, and the addition of new seed URLs into existing web crawl datasets.

These terms and conditions of use are important because the creation of a new voson database will involve resources being spent by Robert Ackland and the Australian National University (ANU), where the VOSON System is currently hosted. These resources relate to bandwidth, server running costs and costs of personnel required to maintain and develop the VOSON System. The creation and analysis of new voson datasets may also entail significant time being spent by the user (e.g. identification of seed URLs, categorisation of sites etc.), and so users have a right to know under what conditions they are obtaining access to the VOSON System.

It should be noted that access to the VOSON System is currently being provided at no charge as part of research being conducted by Robert Ackland.

1. The VOSON System is provided on an "as is" basis -- there are no warranties or guarantees of "fitness for purpose" etc.

2. We will determine the appropriateness of any suggested seed URL (e.g. relevance to the proposed research topic) before it is crawled.

3. There is no guarantee on the duration of access to the VOSON System. The running of the project will be contingent on the usual factors for academic projects e.g. continued funding. However, the VOSON System has now been available on a continual basis for nearly three years, so we fully expect that the service will continue to operate (and grow).

4. Users will be given advance warning of a planned termination of access to the VOSON System and will have an opportunity to download any data they may have collected, for analysis with third-party tools.

5. While we have every intention to release the VOSON platform as an open source project on Sourceforge early in 2008, there are no guarantees on when this will happen, or exactly what code will be released.

6. While we will undertake to backup the data you collect using the VOSON System, we make no guarantees on the backup. You will be expected to also take responsibility for backing up your data by downloading from the VOSON system on a periodic basis.

7. We will attempt to fix bugs in a timely fashion, provide up-to-date and useful documentation and respond to user queries regarding the software. However, we make no guarantees as to the level of help we will provide users.

8. There is no guarantee on how long data collection (crawling) may take - since we will approve seed URLs before they are crawled, there will necessarily be a delay. However, we hope that in the future the need for manual inspection of seed URLs will be reduced.

9. Since the VOSON System is being provided as part of ANU research, and since the research methods embodied in the VOSON System are novel, we expect you to cite relevant papers produced by the VOSON project in any work that you might produce that uses data collected or analysed on the VOSON System.

10. The VOSON System is research software that is still at a "proof of concept" stage. Any research you undertake with VOSON should similarly be exploratory. We highly recommend that you initially conduct small a data collection and analysis of the collected data before embarking on a significant project.

11. If you plan to embark on significant research project, you may wish to contact Robert Ackland about a formal consulting agreement i.e. access to "premium" VOSON services, rather than the "basic" services that are offered free-of-charge to any researcher.

12. We reserve the right to use any of the data that you might collect using the VOSON System for publishing details on the usage of the VOSON System. However, this would not mean using the complete dataset(s) that you have constructed, but rather we might want to construct "meta datasets" that encompass the web crawls that individual researchers have conducted. Also we might be interested in studying what topics people are using the VOSON System for. The VOSON System is being constructed with a "web 2.0" mindset - it is planned that the voson-community website will allow researchers to discover other people working on similar topics or looking at the same websites, in order to foster collaboration opportunities. So, you need to realise that aspects of your work with VOSON may be visible to other users of VOSON. That is, via the construction of meta datasets, it may be possible for other users of VOSON to see what sites you have been crawling and the categorisations schemes you are developing for your research. So this is another reason for you to be careful about your selection of seed URLs. If you are unwilling to share your data in this way you should contact us about "premium" VOSON access, which entails a fee (but you keep your data to yourself).

13. The VOSON System is provided for academic research purposes only. If you want to use it for commercial-related research, please contact Robert Ackland.

14. We reserve the right to revoke access to the VOSON System of any user who is not using it for valid academic research purposes, or who is otherwise using the software in a manner that is deemed inappropriate. The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.