Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On August 17th, 2012, Los Alamos National Laboratory's Herbert Van de Sompel announced the release of the anticipated transactional web archiver called SiteStory . Very excited to announce the release of our SiteStory transactional archive solution # memento mementoweb.github.com/SiteStory/ — Herbert (@hvdsomp) August 17, 2012 The ODU WS-DL research group (in conjunction with The MITRE Corporation ) performed a series of studies to measure the effect of the SiteStory on web server performance. We found that SiteStory does not significantly affect content server performance when it is performing transactional archiving. Content server performance slows from 0.076 seconds to 0.086 seconds per Web page access when the content server is under load, and from 0.15 seconds to 0.21 seconds when the resource has many embedded and changing resources. A sneak-peek at how SiteStory affects server performance is provided below. Please see the technical report for a full descri

I am pleased to report on the successful completion of my Master's Degree thesis entitled "An Extensible Framework for Creating Personal Archives of Web Resources Requiring Authentication". The problem that I hoped to resolve with the study was one that plagues software like Archive Facebook , even to this day, in that when the hierarchy a social media website changes, tools created to preserve content on those sites tend to break. By conforming these tools to a specification that is setup to represent the hierarchy of the target social media websites, these tools become adaptive without the need of continuous maintenance on the part of the developer. Also in the study was an exploration and enumeration of various aspects of personal web archiving that prevent the field from taking advantage of the tools, procedures and mediums that are widely used in conventional web archiving. In addition to simply identifying the problem, I also created a Google Chrome extension, W

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

The WS-DL group is pleased to offer four classes in the Fall 2012 semester: one undergraduate, one undergraduate/graduate, and two upper level graduate classes.  CS 495: Python and Web Mining .  The instructor for this  class will be Hany SalahEldeen and the course content will be focused on data mining and machine learnin g, similar to the " Collective Intelligence " class offered in Spring 2009 with an additional introduction to programming in Python .   CS 418/518: Web Programming .  The instructor for this class will be Dr. Weigle and the course content will focus on programming in a LAMP environment.  The most recent offering of this course was taught in Fall 2010 .  CS 795/895: Information Visualization .  The instructor for this class will be Dr. Weigle and will be a continuation of the class taught in Fall 2011 (see the semester project gallery for a sampling of topics).  2012-08-27 Edit: this class has been moved to Spring 2012.  CS 895: Web-Based Inform

Digital Preservation 2012 was held July 24-25 at the Sheraton Pentagon City in Arlington, Virginia. Previously the NDSA/NDIIPP ( @ndsa2 / @ndiipp ) Partner Meetup (see our trip report from 2011 ), this year's theme was "access to digital content under stewardship". A wide range of presentations were given on the full range of digital preservation topics. Four representatives from the ODU Web Sciences and Digital Libraries group attended to present their research and recent work in one of various realms within the field. WS-DL's Contributions to Digital Preservation 2012 Mat Kelly ( @machawk1 ) presented a demo of a Google Chrome extension he developed called WARCreate , as a further extension to the initial poster/demo presented at WS-DL's trip to JCDL this past June. WARCreate allows a user to create a Web ARChive (WARC) file from any viewable webpage. Mat's main focus was on preserving content behind aut