Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Last week on April 10-11, 2014 I attended the Graduate Cohort Workshop  2014 that took place at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. While there, I  enjoyed the nice weather of California and saw the home to the headquarters of several high-tech companies. CRA-W (Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research) sponsors  a number of activities focused on helping graduate students succeed in CSE research careers. These include educational and community building events, and mentoring. The event was part  of CRA-W, which has several goals, including  (1) increase the number of women in computing (2) provide strategies and information on navigating graduate school (3) early insight into career paths (4) meet others, speaker, graduate students, networking among others and among others. Women students in their first, second or third year of graduate school in computer science and engineering or a closely related field, who a...

We've been working on the development, testing, and improvement of the Memento MediaWiki Extension .  One of our principle concerns is performance. The Memento MediaWiki Extension supports all Memento concepts : Original Resource (URI-R) - in MediaWiki parlance referred to as a "topic URI" Memento (URI-M) - called "oldid page" in MediaWiki TimeMap (URI-T) - analogous to the MediaWiki history page, but in a machine readable format TimeGate (URI-G) - no native equivalent in MediaWiki; acquires a datetime from the Memento client, supplies back the appropriate URI-M for the client to render This article will focus primarily on the TimeGate (URI-G), specifically the analysis of two different alternatives in the implementation of TimeGate.  In this article we use the following terms to refer to these two alternatives: Special:TimeGate - where we use a MediaWiki Special Page to act as a URI-G explicitly URI-R=URI-G - where a URI-R acts as a URI-G if it det...

Web pages, being complex documents, contain embedded resources like images.  As practitioners of digital preservation well know, ensuring that the correct embedded resource is captured when the main page is preserved presents a very difficult problem.  In  A Framework for Evaluation of Composite Memento Temporal Coherence , Scott Ainsworth, Michael L. Nelson, and Herbert Van de Sompel explore this very concept. Figure 1: Web Archive Weather Underground Example Showing the Different Ages of Embedded Resources In Figure 1, borrowed from that paper, we see a screenshot of the  Web Archive's December 9, 2004 memento from Weather Underground .  Even though the age of most of these embedded images differ greatly from the main page, they don't really impact its meaning.  Of interest is the weather map that differs by 9 months, which shows clear skies even though the forecast of the main page calls for clouds and light rain. The Web Archive, as a service e...

Well, I made it! I am finally on the green fine island. After a long trip from Norfolk international airport to Washington DC Dulles then 23 hours in the air except for a fueling pit-stop in Tokyo Narita airport I landed in Changi airport in Singapore. To give you some context, I was invited to spend a semester at the National University of Singapore and work with Dr. Min Yen Kan in the WING research group . The purpose was to work in a common area of interest that helps me progress in the final leg of my PhD marathon and increase the collaboration between our WS-DL lab and WING yielding a reputable paper (or more?). In short, I am a WING this semester! So buckle up! Due to jet lag being a miserable companion the first couple of days, I decided not to take the first day off to rest and settle and go directly to the university. Or maybe it was my excitement? I will never confess. At NUS I did the regular paperwork and met my colleague and fellow research partner for the...

A few days ago, I read an interesting blog post by  Peter Bengtsson . Peter is sampling web pages  and computing basic statistic on the number of domains ( RFC 3986 Host ) required to completely render the page.  Not surprisingly, the mean is quite high: 33.  Also not surprisingly, he has found pages that depend on more than 100 different domains. This started me thinking about how this has changed over time. Over the course of my research I have acquired a corpus of composite mementos (archived web pages and all their embedded images, CSS, etc.) dating from 1996 to 2013.  So, I did a little number crunching. What I suspected and confirmed is that the number of domains has increased over time and that the rate of increase has also increased. This is reflected in the median domains data show in Figure 1. Note that the median shown (3) is a fraction of Peter's (25). I believe there are two major reasons for this. First, our current process for recompo...

We are offering two WS-DL classes for Spring 2014: CS 418/518 Web Programming , Tuesdays & Thursdays 9:30-11am, ECS r. 2120, Dr. Weigle CS 895 Web-Based Information Retrieval , Tuesdays 4:20-7:00pm, ECS r. 3102, Dr. Nelson MS students are welcome in the 895 course; I just don't cross-list it as a 795 for my administrative convenience. For an idea of what the classes will be like, please see the Fall 2012 offering for CS 495/595 and the Spring 2013 offering for CS 895.  --Michael

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a really good year in 2013.  There was a burst of student progress in 2012 and there will likely be more in 2014, but in 2013: Mat Kelly passed his breadth exam Sawood Alam finished his MS thesis , entered the PhD program, and passed the breadth exam We (along with many co-authors at other institutions) were involved with 22 publications, including new venues for our group as well as very strong showings at traditional ones such as JCDL (pictured above) and TPDL: one Internet RFC (Memento) one beta specification (ResourceSync) one poster at IEEE VIS one paper at the WWW developer track two papers at the Temporal Web Workshop two D-Lib Magazine articles two technical reports four full papers and three posters at JCDL five full papers at TPDL Two of the papers received recognition: Scott Ainsworth's paper " Evaluating sliding and sticky target policies by measuring temporal drift in acyclic walks thro...