...

1. Downloads Count
2. Page Views
3. Data Breaches/Audit Trail

Downloads Count

This is the main statistic that the users are currently looking for, it provides a way for project owners, funders and data contributor to monitor the interest over time in the datasets published in a particular project, which then reflects on the interest on the project itself and it is a metric of the value provided by the data in the project. This kind of data is related specifically to the usage of the platform by synapse users, since without being authenticated the downloads are not available. This is part of a generic category of statistics that relates to the entities and metadata that is stored in the backend and it's only a subset of aggregate statistic that can be exposed (e.g. number of projects, users, teams etc).

Page Views

This metric is also an indicator to monitor the interest but it plays a different role and focuses on the general user activity over the synapse platform as a whole. While it might be an indicator for a specific project success it captures a different aspect that might span to different type of clients used to interface on the Synapse API and that include information about users that are not authenticated into synapse. For this particular aspect there are tools already integrated (E.g. google analytics) that collect analytics on the user interactions. Note however that this information is not currently available to the synapse users, nor setup in a way to produce information about specific projects pages, files, wikis etc.

Data Breaches/Audit Trail

Another aspect that came out and might seem related is the identification of when/what/why of potential data breaches (e.g. a dataset was released even though it was not supposed to). This relates to the audit trail of users activity in order to identify potential offenders. While this information is crucial it should not be exposed by the API, and a due process is in place in order to access this kind of data.

Project Statistics

With this brief introduction in mind this document focuses on the main driving use case, that is:

• A funder and/or project creator would like to have a way to understand if the project is successful and if its data is used.

There are several metrics that can be used in order to determine the usage and success of a project, among which:

• Project Access (e.g. page views)
• Number of Downloads
• Number of Uploads
• User Discussions

...

Files, Downloads and Uploads

Files in synapse are referenced through an abstraction (FileHandle) that maintain the information about the link to the content of the file itself (e.g. an S3 bucket). A file handle is then referenced in many places (such as FileEntity and WikiPage, see FileHandleAssociateType) as pointers to the actual file content. In order to actually download the content the synapse platform allows to generated a pre-signed url (according to the location where the file is stored) that can be used to directly download the file. Note that the platform has no way to guarantee that the pre-signed url is actually used by the client in order to download a file. Every single pre-signed url request in the codebase comes down to a single method getURLForFileHandle.

...

Note: In the actual implementation we might have a generic SynapseStatistics interface used as a marker of any statistics request.

Request Object

ProjectStatisticsRequest

<extends> AsynchronousRequestBody

Object used to start the request for retrieving the statistics about a specific project. This object is an AsynchronousResponseBody that will be sent to the /asynchronous/job endpoint in order to start the computation of the project statistics.

...

{
	"projectId": "syn12345"
	"mask": 1
}

Response Object

ProjectStatisticsResponse

<extends> AsynchronousResponseBody

Represents the response for a job request for computing the project statistics (In response to a ProjectStatisticsRequest).

...

...