Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

"Hello Hany!...We are glad to inform you that you have been accepted in the summer internship program this year in Google Zürich GmBH!". Call me a geek but these were the best words I have ever heard! I now work for Google, well in one way or another! After struggling with the visa issues I finally got my Swiss Schengen visa and the work permit. The Swiss people are very strict and precise, they thought I was 2 persons, one named Hany Khalil, and the other Hany SalahEldeen! Well I don't blame them (fyi, in Egypt we don't have the concept of family name, your name is a concatenation of your ancestors names, my name then my father's, then his father's...etc). All my life I have been called Hany SalahEldeen but for some reason the American embassy in Cairo decided that my grandfather's name Khalil suits me better. "Ich spreche kein Deutsch!" or "I don't speak German" Was the sentence I was repeating to my self on the plane to Zürich, y

The Memento Project won the 2010 Digital Preservation Award in London on December 1, 2010. The DPA is sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition , and the Memento Project is sponsored by the Library of Congress (see also: LC's project page ). Details about the DPA are provided in several press releases, including ones from the DPC , ODU , LANL and LC . DPC has also posted a short video of an interview with Herbert . And for posterity, the original tweet from William Kilbride announcing the winner (more information from the award ceremony will be announced on #dpa2010 ). Thanks to the DPC, the DPA judges, the Library of Congress, and everyone on the Memento team! --Michael

I attended a NASA Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) Data System Workshop in Greenbelt Maryland, November 9 - 10. The IPCC is an international committee overseeing the assessment of global climate change. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss technical plan to prepare, incorporate and share IPCC-relevant NASA satellite observational datasets to support the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 ( CMIP5 ). CMIP is a standard protocol and framework for evaluating climate model simulation (hindcast) and predictions/simulation of future climate change. CMIP5 is the 5th evaluation and being organized and lead by the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison ( PCMDI ) mission at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. All of this activity will help contribute to the IPCC 5th Assessment Report (APCC AR5) and beyond. In prior assessments, NASA observational datasets were not used (or very little). NASA HQ has recognized the richness and important of

I recently had a chance to return to the School of Information and Library Science , UNC Chapel Hill, where I had a most enjoyable post-doc during the academic year 2000-2001. Jane Greenberg was nice enough to invite me to speak about Memento in her INLS 520 "Organization of Information" class on Tuesday, November 9th as well as give an invited lecture about Memento to the UNC Scholarly Communications Working Group on Wednesday, November 10th. When I first went to UNC I had the office next to Jane and she was just an assistant professor, now she's a full professor and director of the Metadata Research Center . I enjoyed catching up with her and my many other friends and colleagues at SILS. My slides are available on slideshare.net ; they are mostly a combination of slides I've posted before, but with some updates in the HTTP headers. Although the changes are very slight, the recently submitted (11/12/10) Memento Internet Draft takes precedence over all of our

One of the key contributions of the Memento Framework is the HTTP response header " Memento-Datetime " (previously called "Content-Datetime" in our earlier publications & slides). Memento-Datetime is the sticky, intended datetime* for the representation returned when a URI is dereferenced. The presence of the Memento-Datetime HTTP response header is how the client realizes it has reached a Memento. Rather than formally explain what we mean by "sticky, intended datetime", it is easier to explain how it is neither the value in the HTTP response header Last-Modified , nor is it the creation date of the resource (which has no corresponding HTTP header, for reasons that will become clear). For the examples below, we'll define the following abbreviations: CD (Creation-Datetime) = the datetime the resource was created MD (Memento-Datetime) = the datetime the representation was observed on the web LM (Last-Modified) = the datetime the resource last cha

Tuesday, I gave a presentation introducing some of the research we are doing in our WSDL group to the Records and Archivists (RRAC) national meeting. This group is made of archivists at Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (like MITRE and Aerospace ) and University Archivists. Digital Preservation - ODU from Justin Brunelle I used slides from several of Dr. Nelson's and Martin Klein's presentations (credits recently given in the last slide). I also gave the same presentation to the Agile Development department (of which Carlton is a member) on Tuesday. Both groups widely received the research and had very interesting ideas and comments. The RRAC folks (who were of non-technical backgrounds) questioned the projected lifespan and availability of archives like the Internet Archive (IA) . We also discussed the possibility of the Twitter virus being stored in the IA (and I have yet to investigate this possibility). The other interesting topic of disc

Hello everyone, I am Hany SalahEldeen, a PhD student in my first year and I am honored to be a new member of the Ws-Dl group at Old Dominion University and supervised by Dr. Michael Nelson. I have been in the group for a couple of months now so I thought I should introduce myself and give a background summary on my career before Ws-Dl because I believe if you didn't know where you were, you will never know where you are going. I received my BSc. in Computer Systems Engineering at Alexandria University, Egypt in 2008. My graduation project entitled " VOID: The web-based integrated development environment " was selected to win the first prize in the graduation projects competition in the University for year 2008. For the last 2 years of my degree I was working in a software company back home called eSpace technologies , I worked in developing systems using Ruby on Rails , and was one of the members who developed Neverblock (an open source project to enable easy developmen

Celebrating a year from the very first release of ArchiveFacebook the development team is releasing the new version 1.2. Throughout the last couple of months we have received feedback from the users asking for enhancements and resolving issues. We also received lots of compliments and thumbs up! This feedback was channeled and analyzed to give us an idea on how to enhance the user experience. We released version 1.2 3 days ago with lots of bug fixes and new features, among which the expansion of stories and posts on comments. Several users suggested that it would be useful to be able to archive all the posts and comments on a certain activity (status update, event attendance, photo...etc). Now V 1.2 can support this and any activity stream within your Facebook profile. The new version seems to be highly anticipated to an extent that the number of downloads within the first 3 days even before announcing the release reached 2000 according to Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir

On September 24, I attended the kickoff meeting at Stanford for the Web Archiving Cooperative (WAC) Project, a joint NSF project (~$2.8M) between Stanford , Old Dominion and Harding . A summary of the meeting will be published at a later date, but it was attended by several members of our Advisory Board (from memory: Chris Borgman (UCLA), Trisha Cruse (CDL), Rick Furuta (TAMU), Alon Halevy (Google), Carl Lagoze (Cornell), Raghu Ramakrishnan (Yahoo), Herbert Van de Sompel (LANL)) and several members and friends of the Stanford Infolab . I gave two presentations, the first was a quick review of the state of web preservation (with the obligatory heavy emphasis on Memento ), and the second was some of my ruminations about future things that we should (or should not) explore in the context of WAC. Review of Web Archiving View more presentations from Michael Nelson . My Point of View: Michael L. Nelson Web Archiving Cooperative View more presentations from Michael Nelson . That ni

I created a simple lookup file that contains United States given names (first names) and their associated nicknames or diminutive names. For example "gregory" -> "greg", or "geoffrey" -> "geoff".  The file can be downloaded and contributed to from here  http://code.google.com/p/nickname-and-diminutive-names-lookup/ . This lookup was started from  http://www.tngenweb.org/franklin/frannick. htm  which is used for genealogy purposes. It was a good source to start from but because it is used for genealogy purposes there are some pretty of old names in there.  There was also a significant effort to make it machine readable, i.e. separate names with commas, remove human readable conventions, like "rickie(y)", so that it would be made into two different names "rickie", and "ricky". This is a large list with about 700 entries. Any help from people to clean this list up and add to it is greatly appreciated. Think o

There will be two WS-DL classes offered for Fall 2010. CS 418/518 "Web Programming" will be taught by Martin Klein , but it will be similar in format and content to prior offerings , especially in respect to the focus on LAMP . This class involves significant programming, developing a single project throughout the semester. It is a good complement to CS 495/595 "Web Server Development" which last taught by Martin, in Spring 2010. 2010-08-30 edit: The class page for CS 418/518 is now available. I will teach CS 895 "Time on the Web", a new class that will deal explore the issues of Web resources evolving through time and how we interact with them. Aside from the canonical background readings, we will focus on current and recent projects such as our own Memento & Synchronicity , as well as OAC , Zoetrope , The Re:Search Engine , ADAPT , Past Web Browser , and other projects and papers to be determined. This class will be heavily oriented to

On July 20-22, I was at the NDIIPP Partners Meeting in Arlington VA, along with Martin Klein and Michele Weigle . The Library of Congress has not yet uploaded a public summary of the meeting, but there were a number of interesting additions to previous NDIIPP Partners Meetings (edit: the meeting slides are now available). First, there were keynotes from both the Librarian of Congress , James Billington , as well as the Archivist of the United States , David Ferriero . There was also a ceremony to commemorate the charter members (which includes ODU CS ) of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA). I don't think the NDSA has a canonical web site yet, so the iPRES 2009 paper by Anderson, Gallinger & Potter is probably the best available description (edit: LC has announced a NDSA web site ). There was a theme of exploring the questions about "why we should care about digital preservation". The Library of Congress debuted this video, now available on th

On July 12-13 2010 I was at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2010 in Redmond WA. The agenda was exciting and one of the few conferences that where I've had real difficulty in choosing which of the parallel session to attend. The first keynote was about Kinect for Xbox 360 . The demos were very impressive and I had no idea that motion capture was ready for the home market. Check out the trailer at the MS site . The next session I attended was about the "Bing Dialog Model". I must confess that I'm unconvinced on how different Bing is from Google. Here's a side-by-side comparison of each search engine on the query "Michael Nelson": They seem nearly identical to me: the tri-panel layout (controls on left, content in center, ads on right), the link layout/colors ( blue title , black summary, green URI), interspersed images, tabs at the top, etc. The extended summary Bing gives you when you mouse over a link region is nice, and some of th

I presented a poster at the 2010 13th Conference on Cloud Physics 13th Conference on Atmospheric Radiation in Portland Oregon, June 28 - July 2. This was my first atmospheric science meeting in the 2 years since taking off from NASA to attend full-time graduate studies at Old Dominion University . It was good to be back and catch up on old and new atmospheric sciences research being conducted by my colleages and others. This conference takes place every 4 years. There were approximately 300 hundred scientists from around the world in attendance of which 60-70 were from NASA Langley. This was one of our important conferences to showcase our latest cloud and radiation results and products. Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System ( CERES ) group were well represented. It seem like everyone at Langley who works on CERES were there. I saw many familiar faces and met several new CERES folks. My paper was entitled Alternative Method for Data Fusion of NASA CERES and A-TRAIN

As mentioned earlier I had two papers accepted at HT and JCDL. In June it was time to travel to the conferences and represent the Old Dominion University colors. HT 2010 took place in Toronto, Canada from June 13th-16th and was hosted by the University of Toronto . The acceptance rate of 37% was slightly higher than last year but the number of registered attendees seemed comparable. I was glad to be able to give the very first presentation since it secured the probably greatest audience of the entire conference. My slides are available through Slideshare. Is This a Good Title? View more presentations from Old Dominion University . The paper itself titled " Is This a Good Title " can be obtained through the ACM Digital Library and its content was covered in my earlier post . My personal highlight of the conference was the keynote by Andrew Dillon . He argued that research on Hypertext today is shaped too much by the Internet and its (inter-)linked natu

I attended the 2010 Foo Camp in Sebastopol CA, June 25-27. For those who are unfamiliar, Foo Camp is an invitation-only " unconference " -- which is basically a conference that consists entirely of birds-of-a-feather sessions as well as the impromptu hallway and dinner conversations that make conferences useful. There were approximately 250 people there and by my estimation they were mostly young (25-35) entrepreneurs (current and former). There were a smattering of others as well: artists, writers, professors, VCs, etc. The best way I can describe Foo Camp is a combination of Burning Man (culture of participation), SIGGRAPH (culture of demonstration), and a country club (culture of capitalism). Geeks aren't really known for being extroverted, but the format of Foo Camp pretty much requires meeting new people and interaction with people outside of your existing circle of colleagues. I was surprised at how approachable most people were. Formulating the sche

Hypertext 2010 13 - 16 June 2010 has come and gone, but the memories linger . Overview Martin Klein and I presented our respective papers. He will be detailing his experience and his paper Is This a Good Title? at Hypertext 2010 when he returns from JCDL 2010. My paper Analysis of Graphs for Digital Preservation Suitability and it's associated PowerPoint presentation are available. The paper and the presentation was given at the Hypertext 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A complete Hypertext program is available here . Day zero, 12 June Mary (my wife) and I got to Toronto late Saturday. We were four and a half hours late out of Norfolk because of weather problems in Chicago. Fortunately Mary made alternative reservations out of Dulles to Toronto as soon as we thought we were going to miss our connection. Pays to pay attention and to have alternative plans. Martin (the sly dog) chose to travel 13 June on a direct flight from Richmond, VA to Toronto. Day one, 13