Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On May 13, Hany SalahEldeen and I attended the third  Temporal Web Analytic Workshop , collocated with WWW 2013 in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Marc Spaniol , from Max Planck Institute for Informatics , Germany, welcomed the audience in the opening note of the workshop. He emphasized on the target of the workshop to build a community of interest in the temporal web. Omar Alonso , from Microsoft Silicon Valley , was the keynote speaker with presentation entitled: “Stuff happens continuously: exploring Web contents with temporal information”. Omar divided his presentation into three parts: Time in document collection, Social data, and Exploring the web using time. In the Time in document collection, Omar gave an intro about the temporal dimension of the document. He defined the characteristics of the temporal by first defining “What is Time?”. The time may be used in normalized format or hierarchy format. The time has 4 types: times; duration; sets, which may explicit (i.e...

(note: Carbon Date 2.0 was released on 2014-11-14 ) In the course of our research we often needed to determine when a certain web resource was created. In numerous cases, this question is fairly straightforward to answer by examining the resource itself. Articles often have publishing datetime stamps, social media contributions have posting time, and others you can estimate the creation date from reading the resource itself. This process is simple upon manually examining the resource, but when the dataset of resources is large it is harder to automate. To solve this problem we conducted several experiments to determine when the resource was created automatically. When a resource is created it often gets indexed in the search engines, archived in the public archives, and shared in the social media thus leaving trails of existence. We trace those trails of existence and use the first appearance of the first trail as a close estimate of the creation date. The timeline below illustra...