Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The JCDL 2013 Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world who are in the early phases of their dissertation work.  Students present their thesis and research plan and a panel of prominent professors and experienced practitioners in the field of Digital Libraries provides feedback in a constructive atmosphere.  Yasmin AlNaomony and Scott Ainsworth had the privilege of presenting papers at this year's Doctoral Consortium. Scott Ainsworth, Michael Nelson, & Yasmin AlNoamany User Interaction The first session focused on user interaction and was chaired by George Buchanan .  The session began with Erik Choi presenting his work on understanding the motivations behind the questions users ask in Internet Q&A forums.  Prior work in this area has focused on the use an content of Q&A forums; Erik's work focuses on why users ask questions with motivation, expectations, and the relationship between the them. Yasmin AlNaomony pres

 On March 21 & 22 members of the ResourceSync technical group met in Ann Arbor Michigan to work the 0.5 version of the ResourceSync specification .  In case you're not familiar, ResourceSync is a framework, intended to replace OAI-PMH , for specifying how a destination ("harvester" in PMH terms) can synchronize the web resources of a source ("repository" in PMH terms).  The source publishes a list of resources that it makes available via ResourceSync (which may be a subset of valid resources at the web site) using Sitemaps , with the idea that if you're already using Sitemaps then you are already minimally compliant, and the more advanced features of ResourceSync also use the Sitemap syntax for consistency.  Although the syntactic details are in flux, Herbert's presentation at the September 2012 NISO Forum is a good introduction the framework, as are the two recent D-Lib Magazine articles ( Sept/Oct 2012 and Jan/Feb 2013 ).  Some important

Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service, provided by the Internet Archive , that allows institutions and users to create, maintain, and view digital collections of web resources. The current interface of Archive-It is largely text-based, supporting drill-down navigation using lists of URIs. While this interface provides good searching capabilities, it is not very efficient for browsing. This was our motivation for thinking about new visualizations to make it easy for users to browse Archive-It collections. This work, "Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It", was the subject of a recent MS thesis by Kalpesh Padia (who is continuing his Ph.D. studies at NC State University ) and a JCDL 2012 short paper by Kalpesh Padia, Yasmin AlNoamany , and Michele C. Weigle . In order to provide a better visual experience to users of Archive-It collections, we implemented six different visualizations (treemap, time cloud, bubble chart, image plot, timeline, and wo

On Saturday, my colleague, Justin Brunelle , and I took off on a road trip to attend this year’s JCDL conference in Washington, D.C. We arrived at the nation’s capital earlier that evening and began preparing our presentations after settling in at the George Washington University Inn . Both of us were accepted to present our work at the conference’s Doctoral Consortium . Justin has already blogged about the consortium and our experience in his brilliant blog post . The conference started on the following Monday (June 10 th ). The registration went smoothly and we all took our seats at the Betts Theatre in the Marvin Center which sits in the heart of George Washington University . Barrie Howard and Karim Boughida (the conference co-chairs) gave the welcoming remarks and were followed by Leo M. Chalupa , the Vice President of Research at the university. Michael Nelson , opened up the session and introduced the keynote speaker, Jason Scott . Winning the award for the Most “

JCDL 2011 ( #jcdl2011 ) was held June 13–16 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The weather was beautiful and the conference sessions wonderful. The ODU Web Sciences and Digital Libraries team was fortunate enough to have six of its members attend, present three short papers, and demonstrate the Synchronicity Firefox extension. Our Contributions to JCDL 2011 Ahmed Alsum presented How Much of the Web is Archived? This paper approximates the amount of the Web that is archived using four URI sources. From this data, we observe significant variation in archival rate in URIs from different sources. So, how much of the web is archived? It depends on which web you mean. ( pdf , slides ). How Much of the Web is Archived? JCDL 2011 from Ahmed AlSum Martin Klein presented Rediscovering Missing Web Pages Using Link Neighborhood Lexical Signatures , which details a method for discovering missing web pages (the dreaded 404 ). Martin also demonstrated Synchronicity , a Firefox

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

Not without pride I see two of my papers being accepted at the upcoming conferences ACM Hypertext (HT) and ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) . The paper " Evaluating Methods to Rediscover Missing Web Pages from the Web Infrastructure " will be published at JCDL. It is co-authored with my advisor Dr. Michael L. Nelson . As part of my ongoing dissertation work we are investigating methods to rediscover missing web pages with the help of the web infratructure (search engines, their caches, the Internet Archive, etc) in real time meaning while the user is browsing the web. This paper evaluates the performance of four of these methods: the title of the web page, its lexical signature (LS) representing the most salient terms of its content, its tags obtained from delicious.com and its neighborhood lexical signature (NHLS), a LS based on content of pages that link to the centroid page. We generate a corpus of web pages by randomly sampling from the Open Directo

The Winter 2009 Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries ( TCDL ) has the extended abstracts from the Doctoral Consortium of the 2009 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries ( JCDL 2009 ). Thanks to Lisa Spiro for such a great job putting together the latest IEEE TCDL Bulletin. Megan Winget (UT Austin) and I organized the doctoral consortium this year. We were fortunate enough to have 24 submissions this year -- a record number -- of which we selected 14 for presentation. Those 14 students had their extended abstracts reviewed by a 10 person committee prior to the consortium and then they presented their research to the committee. More information about the participants and processes is available in our opening editorial and the JCDL 2009 Doctoral Consortium page. Neither Megan nor I will be involved in the 2010 JCDL Doctoral Consortium, to be held in Gold Coast, Australia. Those wishing to participate should check the JCDL 2010 web site for

We had a good showing at the 2009 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in Austin, TX last week. In total, we had 1 full paper, 3 short papers, 2 posters, 1 workshop paper and 1 doctoral consortium paper. JCDL is the flagship conference in our field and we always make a point to send as many people as possible. Chuck Cartledge (left) presented "A Framework for Digital Object Self-Preservation" at the doctoral consortium . He also presented the related short paper " Unsupervised Creation of Small World Networks for the Preservation of Digital Objects ". Chuck is planning to have his doctoral candidacy exam sometime in the early fall. Michael presented the full paper " Using Timed-Release Cryptography to Mitigate The Preservation Risk of Embargo Periods ". This paper was based on Rabia Haq's MS Thesis, which she defended in the fall of 2008. Michael also co-organized the doctoral consortium and convinced WS-DL alumna Joan Smith