Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On Wednesday, August 5, 2015 Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory) will give a colloquium in the ODU Computer Science Department entitled "A Perspective on Archiving the Scholarly Web".  It will be held in the third floor E&CS conference room (r. 3316) at 11am.  Space is somewhat limited (the first floor auditorium is being renovated), but all are welcome to attend.  The abstract for his talk is:  A Perspective on Archiving the Scholarly Web As the scholarly communication system evolves to become natively web-based and starts supporting the communication of a wide variety of objects, the manner in which its essential functions -- registration, certification, awareness, archiving -- are fulfilled co-evolves.  Illustrations of the changing implementation of these functions will be used to arrive at a high-level characterization of a future scholarly communication system and of the objects that will be communicated. The focus will then shift to the fu

Earlier this week Herbert Van de Sompel gave a webinar for the ICSU World Data System entitled " Web-Centric Solutions for Web-Based Scholarship ".  It's a short and simple review of some of the interoperability projects we've worked on through since 1999, including OAI-PMH , OAI-ORE , and Memento .  He ends with a short nod to his simple but powerful " Signposting the Scholarly Web " proposal, but the slides in the appendix give the full description. The main point of this presentation was to document how each project successively further embraced the web, not just as a transport protocol but fully adopting the semantics as part of the protocol.  Herbert and I then had a fun email discussion about how the web, scholarly communication, and digital libraries were different in 1999 (the time of OAI-PMH & our initial collaboration) and now.  Some highlights include: Although Google existed, it was not the hegemonic force that it is today, and co

Inspired by the " #icanhazpdf "  movement   and built upon the Memento   service,  I Can Haz Memento  attempts to expand the awareness of  Web Archiving  through  Twitter . Given a URL (for a page) in a tweet with the hash tag " #icanhazmemento ," the I Can Haz Memento service replies the tweet with a link pointing to an archived version of the page closest to the time of the tweet. The consequence of this is: the archived version closest to the time of the tweet likely expresses the intent of the user at the time the link was shared. Consider a scenario where Jane shares a link in a tweet to the front page of  cnn  about a story on healthcare. Given the fluid nature of the news cycle, at some point, the story about healthcare would be replaced by another fresh story; thus the link in Jane's tweet and its corresponding intent (healthcare story) become misrepresented by Jane's original link (for the new story). This is where I Can Haz Memento comes i

It was the last day of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2015 when the Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) 2015 was scheduled and it started on time. When I entered in the workshop room, I realized we needed a couple of more chairs to accommodate all the participants, which was a good problem to have. The session started with a brief informal introduction of individual participants. Without wasting any time, the lightning talks session was started. Gerhard Gossen started the lightning talk session with his presentation on "The iCrawl System for Focused and Integrated Web Archive Crawling". It was a short description of how iCrawl can be used to create archives for current events, targeted primarily to researchers and journalists. The demonstration illustrated how to search on the Web and Twitter for trending topics to find good seed URLs, manually add seed URLs and keywords, extract entities, configure crawling basic po

Large, Dynamic and Ubiquitous –The Era of the Digital Library JCDL 2015 ( #JCDL2015 ) took place at the University of Tennessee Conference Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. The conference was four days long; June 21-25, 2015. This year three students from our WS-DL CS group at ODU  had their papers accepted as well as one poster (see trip reports for 2014, 2013 , 2012 , 2011 ). Dr. Weigle ( @weiglemc ), Dr. Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ), Sawood Alam ( @ibnesayeed ), Mat Kelly ( @machawk1 ) and I ( @LulwahMA ) went to the conference. We drove from Norfolk, VA. Four of our previous members of our group, Martin Klein (UCLA, CA) ( @mart1nkle1n ), Joan Smith (Linear B Systems, inc., VA) ( @joansm1th ), Ahmed Alsum (Stanford University, CA) ( @aalsum ) and Hany SalahEldeen (Microsoft, Seattle)( @hanysalaheldeen ), also met us there. The trip was around 8 hours. We enjoyed the mountain views and the beautiful farms. We also caught parts of a storm on our way, but it only lasted for two