The Internet has been established not only as a convenient medium for interaction but also as a low-cost means for communication. As a result, common people with different levels of technical know-how use the Internet for business transactions as well as personal communication. A huge user base has developed as a consequence of the overwhelming popularity of the Internet. It also attracts the fraudsters who lure uninformed users and collect sensitive personal information from them through phishing websites. Phishing websites look similar to those of legitimate organizations, and the fraudsters easily exploit the ignorance of the users who reveal their personal information. Thus, the Internet has become another venue for criminal and fraudulent activities. These activities are gradually growing and are more prominent in the case of banking and financial institutions. The paper, “Exploring the Factors that Influence an Internet User’s Ability to Correctly Identify Phishing Websites”, by Swapan Purkait, presents an empirical research study to address the menace. Through a simulation of phishing attack, the author collects quantitative data on the users’ profiles and measures their ability to identify the phishing websites. The study finds that many Internet users do not understand phishing attacks properly and are unable to realize the sophistication thereof. However, the study reveals that the users who are victims of phishing in the past do well to identify a phishing website.

Electronic Governance (e-Governance) is the provision of Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent (SMART) governance using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It has the potential to eliminate or drastically reduce corruption in government and foster good governance. The e-Governance in India dates back to the early 1980s when computerization in government departments was given importance. However, e-Governance took a broader dimension in the 1990s when government departments developed web portals to reach out to common citizens, with the emphasis on public policy and its implementation. Through these websites, government departments provide information on the functions and policies of the government and deliver various public services. Using e-Governance, citizens get faster access to information and services. It improves government-citizen engagement, reposes public confidence in government and creates transparency in the system. However, in a country like India, there are several challenges to e-Governance projects. There is a visible digital divide existing due to poverty and poor ICT infrastructure in rural areas. While English dominates the Internet, a large number of official languages are used in government offices. Further, poor literacy level in rural India poses hindrance to realizing the benefits of e-Governance projects. Given this backdrop, the quality of e-Governance websites plays a major role in the successful implementation of e-Governance. Website design must be given due consideration, not only to the information quality and services offered but also to the usability aspects of the website keeping the challenges in mind. In the paper, “Role of Website Quality in e-Governance Web Portals in India”, the authors, Jaya Iyer and R K Srivastava, have made an attempt to evolve some quality factors of e-Governance websites that can lead to effective public usage. Based on a survey and factor analysis of the data collected therein, the authors present nine factors which, according to them, form the pillars of the website that attract Indian masses towards e-Governance.

The enormous popularity of the Internet has made it a huge repository of web documents containing information of all kinds. The plethora and diversity of information on the Internet necessitate techniques in order to extract relevant information in a decision context. Web usage mining refers to mining of web usage data in web access logs that every web server maintains as a consequence of user request for a resource on the World Wide Web. The web access logs are analyzed using various computational methods to divulge interesting knowledge about user behavior and access patterns, which can be effectively used to improve user experience on the websites. Since the source data in the web logs are primarily unlabeled, spread across multiple files and vary in their structure and format, it poses a bigger challenge for the researchers to process, extract and discover useful information. Neural network is one of the several computational techniques used to classify web access logs. Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) using back propagation has been the most widely used architecture of neural network applications for several decades. However, it suffers from many limitations such as local minima trapping, saturation, weight interference, initial weight dependence, and also over-fitting that makes MLP training difficult. In addition, it requires fixing parameters like number of neurons in a layer and number of hidden layers in a network which are left to the best judgment of the researcher. Therefore, it is difficult to arrive at a proper MLP architecture. Such limitations are addressed in Radial Basis Function Neural (RBFN) network, another member of computational intelligence family. The paper, “Application of Radial Basis Function Neural Networks on Web Logs”, by
Ch Sanjeev Kumar Dash, Manoj Kumar Pandia and Satchidananda Dehuri describes the use of RBFN for classification of web access logs and presents the classification accuracy.

Finally, in the paper, “Web Content Mining: Issues and Challenges”, by Sankaranarayanan Deepa and Shanmugasundaram Hariharan, a brief overview of web content mining is presented. It analyzes the representative research works in the area and points out the challenges in web content mining to derive motivation for future work.

-- A C Ojha
Consulting Editor