Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

This post is hardly timely, but I wanted to gather together some resources that I have been using for REST (Representational State Transfer) and HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State).  It seems like everyone claims to be RESTful, but mentioning HATEOAS is frequently met with silence.  Of course, these terms come from Roy Fielding 's PhD dissertation , but I won't claim that it is very readable (it is not the nature of dissertations to be readable...).  Fortunately he's provided more readable blog posts about REST and HATEOAS . At the risk of aggressively over-simplifying things, REST = "URIs are nouns, not verbs" and HATEOAS = "follow your nose". "Follow your nose" simply means that when a client dereferences a URI, the entity that is returned is responsible for providing a set of links that allows the user agent to transition to the next state.  This standard procedure in HTML: you follow links to guide you through an o

test On November 12, I attended the 2013 Archive-It Partner Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, our research group's second year of attendance (see 2012 Trip Report ). The meeting started off casually at 9am with breakfast and registration. Once everyone was settled, Kristine Hanna , the Director of Archiving Services at Internet Archive introduced her team that was present of the meeting. Kristine acknowledged the fire at Internet Archive last week and the extent of the damage. "It did burn to the ground but thankfully, nobody was injured." She reminded the crowd of partners to review Archive-It 's storage and preservation policy and mentioned the redundancies in-place, including a soon-to-be mirror at our very own ODU. Kristine then mentioned news of a new partnership with Reed Technologies to jointly market and sell Archive-It ( @archiveitorg ). She reassured the audience that nothing would change beyond having more resources for them to accomplish their goals.

The Memento Team is soliciting feedback on two white papers that address related proposals for more tightly integrating the past and current web. The first is " Thoughts on Referencing, Linking, Reference Rot ", which is inspired by the hiberlink project.  This paper proposes making temporal semantics part of the HTML <a> element, via "versiondate" and "versionurl" attributes that respectively include the datetime the link was created and optionally a link to an archived version of the page (in case the live web version becomes 404, goes off topic, etc.).  The idea is that "versiondate" can be used as a Memento-Datetime value by a client, and "versionurl" can be used to record a URI-M value.  This approach is inspired by the Wikipedia Citation Template , which has many metadata fields, including "accessdate" and "archiveurl".  For example, in the article about the band "Coil", one of the links t

We are halfway through the 2013 NFL season and it is time for our WSDL mid-season rankings. Both conferences have one winless team, Jacksonville in the AFC and Tampa Bay in the NFC.  The NFC is looking rather lackluster this year with no standout teams so far. The NFC East teams in particular need to get their acts together. The AFC appears to be dominating the League with  a number of teams that are performing quite well. Two teams that show up on the top of every power ranking list are the Denver Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs. Kansas City has a great defense, using our efficiency ratings they are rated as the fifth best defense in the league. However a good defense will only get you so far when your offense is ranked at 27th out of 32. Denver on the other hand has the highest ranked offense in our system with a lot of that on Peyton Mannings shoulders. A good passing offense correlates quite well with a team that wins games. Here is where our ranking system rates each of th

Everyday we create more and more digital files that record our lives.  We take selfies (with and without our loved ones).  We record our baby's first step.  We take pictures of things that we have or would like to have.  The number of digital file and artifacts we create grows and grows and the places where we can store them seem to have almost infinite capacity.  Smart phones with 64Gigabytes of storage, could hold almost 20,000 MP3 files (roughly 1,000 hours of listening time, or about 6 months of listening 8 hours a day).  Amateur cameras can have the same amount of storage, and depending on image size and frames per second can store days of continuous recordings or about 500,000 still images.  We can and are creating more digital artifacts than we can manage.  Being able to create so much, means we don't care about what we create.  We create because it is easy.  We create because it is fun.  We create because we have a new toy.  We create because we can.  There is a signi

If you recall, way back in 2012, Kalpesh Padia (now at N.C. State under Christopher Healey ) and Yasmin AlNoamany ( @yasmina_anwar ) presented "Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It", a paper presented at JCDL 2012 , which was the product of Dr. Michele C. Weigle's ( @weiglemc ) pair of infovis-related courses at Old Dominion University (ODU): CS825 - Information Visualization and CS895 - Applied Visual Analytics . Like Kalpesh and Yasmin, I have turned a semester project into a conference submission with a poster/demo accepted to IEEE VIS 2013: Graph-Based Navigation of a Box Office Prediction System . The impetus for this strangely out-of-topic (for this blog's theme) submission has roots in the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge, a competition where a large data set is supplied to contestants and a meaningful visual representation is created with each submission. Both Kalpesh and I had previously participated in the VAST

On October 2-5, I was thrilled to attend Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) , the world's largest gathering for women in computing, and meet so many amazing and inspiring women in computing. This year, GHC was held in Minneapolis, MN. It is presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology , which was founded by Dr. Anita Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney in 1994 to bring together research and career interests of women in computing and encourage the participation of women in computing. GHC was held for the first time in 1994 in Washington DC. The theme of the conference this year was "Think Big - Drive Forward". There were many sessions and workshops that targeted academics and business. The Computing Research Association Committee on Women in Computing ( CRA-W ),  offered sessions targeted towards academics. I had a chance to attend Graduate Cohort Workshop last April, which was held in Boston, MA, and created a blog post about it. The fi