Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I've just finished attending the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) Phase II Workshop in Chicago, IL (March 24-25, 2011). The quality of the presentations was very high and I was surprised at how much the OAC community has grown in a relatively short time. Although I've served on OAC technical review panels before and my student, Abdulla Alasaadi, has worked on a small prototype (to be presented at JCDL 2011 ) for using SVG instead of the W3C Media Fragments for specifying an annotation target, I haven't been keeping up with the OAC community as closely as I should. The Workshop has all the presentations online , as well as a wiki that contains various commentary, use cases, etc. (also, the hash tag is " #oacwkshp "). Although all of the presentations generated a lot of discussion from the attendees, the presentations that I learned the most from were: Annotation Supporting Collaborative Development of Scholarly Editions ( Jane Hunter and Anna Gerbe

Announcing the publication of an Old Dominion Computer Science Department technical report and an homage to Davide Carradine, Keye Luke and the television series Kung Fu. "Grasshopper." "Yes, Master Po?" "Grasshopper, you have passed many tests of strength, agility and stamina. But that is not enough. There are other trials you must pass before you are permitted to attempt to lift the fiery brazier. I will ask you a series of questions. “Let us begin. What is a graph?" "Master; a graph is a mathematical construct made of objects that may, or may not be connected to each other." "Grasshopper, how does a graph relate to digital libraries and the world where we live?" "Master; a graph is composed of nodes (or vertices) that can be connected in a pairwise manner with edges (or arcs). In the world of Facebook, people take the place of nodes and the connection that is made when one person “friends” another creates an edge. In the Wo

I recently conducted an experiment on tags provided from the bookmarking site delicious.com . The goal was to obtain a decent sized sample set of URIs and tags that users have used to annotate the URIs. The website provides a recent tool that automatically redirects to a somewhat random URI that was recently annotated by some Delicious user. By parsing the HTTP headers I was able to grab the redirect URI and therefore build a corpus of 5000 unique URIs. The URI for the tool is http://www.delicious.com/recent/?random=1 . As the second step I needed to obtain the corresponding tags for each URI. I tried to be a good programmer and used the Delicious API to query for the tags instead of parsing the web interface. In order to use the API (v1) you need an account with Delicious/Yahoo. The request for https://username:pwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/suggest?url=http://www.google.com/ for example returns an XML formated response with the top five popular tags: search google search eng

Last week, along with Dr. Nelson , I attended the 2nd annual conference of Personal Digital Archiving held at the Internet Archive in the heart of the foggy city , San Francisco. The weather was not on our side as the sunny state was facing the worst weather in quite a while . This didn't turn my spirit down as I was excited to be in room with experts and passionate geniuses whose collective IQ could cause an integer over-flow ! The general atmosphere was really nice; participants were very friendly and eager to introduce themselves and get to know you. I got exposed to a ton of ideas, projects and insights over coffee sometimes while other times just going up and down the stairs. My only regret is that I don't have a contact card as I got a bunch of them; I got to get me some of these! So that the readers can relive this experience with me I have divided the conference into two days each in turn is divided into sessions. I will try to highlight a thing or two from eac