ENHANCED WEBOMETRICS SYSTEM FOR UNIVERSITY RANKING

Abstract

The World Wide Web is one of the main sources of information and the main showcase for individuals, institutions, business enterprises and everyone who wants to be recognized in the real world. At the academic level, Universities have a very important role to communicate scientific and cultural achievements to a large population to reflect the activities of the Institution and showcase its achievements. The field of Webometrics was popularized by the “Ranking of World Universities” project that rated the web presence of most universities in the world. The original aim of the Ranking of the World Universities was to promote Web publication such as Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic materials. Previous works emphasized on the objective features of Universities which do not sufficiently give account of the activities of Universities. In this thesis, an enhanced Webometrics System that incorporates subjective features is proposed for ranking Federal Universities in Nigeria. The features are social media presence, existence of beneficiary programs to the Government and educational impact programs on the society. Detailed data were gathered with the aid of Google search engines, Google Scholar, Web Crawlers and Web Rippers. The system was implemented using ASP.Net and C# programming language. The accuracy level of the proposed system was measured with Spearman Rank Correlation, and the results showed a significant impact of the contribution to knowledge. A social acceptance survey was conducted with the aid of questionnaires on the proposed model and it had above 70% acceptance. It was deduced from the research that there is major focus on the existing Webometrics ranking criteria by most Universities studied and neglected reflecting other inner activities of the Institution on their websites.