Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The International Internet Preservation Consortium ( IIPC ) held its annual general assembly meeting for 2012 from Apr 30 to May 4, 2012, in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. I concluded this report based on Tweets using #IIPC12 from the meeting and my personal notes. In this report, I tried to assess how much the tweets about an event could give you a complete view about it. More details about the new approach will be in the blog comment. The first day, April 30, 2012 was open to the public. It was entitled "The Broad Value of Web Archives: Demonstrated Use", @hhockx: : #iipc12 opened just now by Martha Anderson . Laura Campbell welcomes the participants. @netpreserve: IIPC starts with 11 members, now has 42. @gregorylisa: Apropos quote at #IIPC12 "The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." William James.   @netpreserve: Gildas Illien from BnF sets the stage for researcher use case panel. @cleymour: Gildas Il...

Recently I was invited to present Ruby on Rails as a rapid Web application development platform at an ODU ACM meeting. I have divided the session into three phases: presentation followed by live example application development and Q&A. The example application was a simple RESTful database driven application to store attendees' record with several attributes of various data-types. I started the presentation with an overview of Ruby language . Ruby is a fairly new general purpose multi-paradigm (including functional, object oriented, imperative and reflective) language, with syntax inspired by Python , Smalltalk and many other languages. Ruby is designed for programmer productivity and fun hence, its primary focus is human rather than computer needs. This philosophy goes very well with the rapidly changing client needs. Often by the time programers are done with the application development as per the specifications, the client's needs have already changed. Hence, R...

On March 6, 2012 we had a ResourceSync telecon for the purpose of explaining the goals of the project, some preliminary technology explorations, as well as soliciting potential partners in the development of a NISO standard . The project is joint between NISO and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation . The details of the project are yet to be decided, but the focus is on exploring differing modalities for change notification (CN) and content transfer (CT). We are exploring a variety of push technologies to augment conventional harvesting technologies (e.g., RSS, Atom, OAI-PMH). More details can be found in the slides Herbert and Rob covered during the telecon: ResourceSync: Conceptual and Technical Problem Perspective from Herbert Van de Sompel The ResourceSync team had a face-to-face meeting in Baltimore, February 2-3, 2012 where we settled on some of the basic project parameters and discussed an early prototype. Prior t...

For its third consecutive year, the Personal Digital Archiving conference took place at Internet Archive in San Francisco , CA. Ahmed and I attended a diverse range of fascinating sessions on how people think about creating and preserving personal digital archives. The environment was very nice, and friendly (there were a baby and a dog in the second day ^_^). The conference was held on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25, 2012. The first day started at 9:00 am with a keynote and welcome intro by Brewster Kahle about the Internet Archive and personal archives. Brewster gave a quick intro about Internet Archive history and asked an important question, “what would we want out of the Internet Archive in terms of preserving stuff that individuals are creating?”, which should be solved by knowing how to collect materials and make them useful for the people from this conference. Mike Ashenfelder from the Library of Congress gave a talk entitled “Personal Digital Archive Advice for the General Publ...

The Egyptian revolution on the 25th of January 2011 was unlike any other revolution in history because of the role of social media . Several blogs, Storify entries, web pages, channels on YouTube where created to document the revolution . Several books were even published documenting the 18 days . All of these contributions were made by the public, not historians, utilizing the tools of web 2.0 . As a result of all these contributions we have an enormous digital content including thousands of posts, tweets, images, videos and sound files narrating and documenting the revolution. Unfortunately, at the first anniversary of this revolution over 10% of this digital content is already gone. Websites like Twitter , YouTube , Facebook , Storify , 1000Memories , Blogger and IAmJan25 have allowed the public to document the events of the revolution in real-time. Storify, for example, allows the user to create a timed organized collection of tweets, links, images, posts, map locations or video...

Superbowl 46 is today and whether you love football or if you just watch for the commercials you are in for some entertainment tonight. Tonight's game is one of the closest games in recent history. There is no doubt that New England has a great offense led by Tom Brady. New England has an Offensive Passing Efficiency of 7.65 yards per play compared to a league average of 5.97. The Giants led by Eli Manning are not far behind with a Passing efficiency of 7.32 yards per play. Both teams are in the top five for offensive passing. However the differences are more dramatic on the defensive side of the house. The Giants have given up 5.97 yards per play which is the league average. The patriots have the 29th worst pass defense and have have given up an average of 6.68 yards per play. Running the algorithms the same way we have all year has the Patriots winning the Superbowl. The predicted margin of victory matches the Vegas Line exactly so this will be a close game. Because this is Sc...

After a long hiatus, the Warrick tool has been resurrected with some modifications. Warrick is a free utility for reconstructing (or recovering) a website. The original version of Warrick discovered archived versions of resources by searching the Web Infrastructure (which includes search engine caches and the Internet Archive ) for archived versions of web resources. It would automatically download and organize the best versions of the archived resources and package them into a copy of the deleted site. As discussed by Warrick's creator, Frank McCown , the original version of Warrick was prone to breaking due to frequent changes to search engine APIs and archive URLs . Warrick 2.0, adapted from Dr. McCown's original code by Justin F. Brunelle , interfaces with the Memento framework via the mcurl program (developed by Ahmed AlSum ). By incorporating Memento timemaps, Warrick no longer has the responsibility of directly searching and communicating with the caches and archive...