Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

When I am not studying Web Sciences at ODU, I work as a software developer at Analytical Mechanics Associates . In general, my work there aims to make satellite data more accessible. As part of this mission, one of my primary projects is the COVE tool . The COVE tool allows a user to view where a satellite could potentially take an image. The above image shows the ground swath of both Landsat 7 (red) and Landsat 8 (green) over a one day period.  The CEOS Visualization Environment (COVE) tool is a browser-based system that leverages Cesium , an open-source JavaScript library for 3D globes and maps, in order to display satellite sensor coverage areas and identify coincidence scene locations. In other words, the COVE tool allows the user to see where a satellite could potentially take an image and where two or more satellite paths overlap during a specified time period. The Committee on Earth Observing Satellites (CEOS) is currently operating and planning hundreds of Earth observat

Recently, we conducted an experiment using mementos for almost 700,000 web pages from more than 20 web archives.  These web pages spanned much of the life of the web (1997-2012). Much has been written about acquiring and extracting text from live web pages, but we believe that this is an unparalleled attempted to acquire and extract text from mementos themselves. Our experiment is also distinct from AlNoamany's work  or  Andy Jackson's work , because we are trying to acquire and extract text from mementos across many web archives, rather than just one. We initially expected the acquisition and text extraction of mementos to be a relatively simple exercise, but quickly discovered that the idiosyncrasies between web archives made these operations much more complex.  We document our findings in a technical report entitled:  " Rules of Acquisition for Mementos and Their Content ". Our technical report briefly covers the following key points: Special techniques for

As I have mentioned previously , I am the MITRE chair of the Federal Cloud Computing summit . The Summits are designed to allow representatives from government agencies that would not necessarily cross paths to collaborate and learn from one another about the best practices, challenges, and recommendations for adopting emerging technologies in the federal government. The MITRE- ATARC Collaboration Symposium is a working group-style session in which academics, representatives from industry, government, and FFRDC representatives discuss potential solutions and ways-forward for the top challenges of emerging technology adoption in government. MITRE helps select the challenge areas by polling government practitioners on their top challenges, and the participants break into groups to discuss each challenge area. The Collaboration Symposium allows this heterogeneous group of cloud practitioners to collaborate across all levels, from the end users to researchers to practitioners to po

. @WebSciDL reunion at #jcdl2015 - 4 phd alumni, 3 phd students, 2 profs! pic.twitter.com/kA8CUYtZCW — Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) June 23, 2015 The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a terrific 2015, marked by four new student members, one Ph.D. defense, and two large research grants.  In many ways it was even better than 2014 and 2013 . We had fewer students graduate or advance their status this year, but last year was unusually productive.  We did add four new students, as well as graduate a PhD student, an MS student, and had two other students advance their status: Hany SalahEldeen defended his Ph.D. on May 5, 2015 and then took a cross country motorcycle trip on his way to join Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.   Shawn Jones defended his M.S. thesis on March 23, 2015 and then joined LANL as a Graduate Research Assistant in the fall of 2015.  Shawn will continue his PhD work while @ LANL, working with Herbert Van de Sompel . Sawo

The CNI Fall 2015 Membership Meeting was held in Washington, D.C., December 14-15, 2015.  Like all CNI meetings, the Fall 2015 meeting was excellent and contained many high quality presentations.  Unfortunately, the members' project briefings ran simultaneously, with 7 or 8 different presentations overlapping at any given time.  As a result I missed a great deal.  Cliff Lynch kicked off the meeting with reflections about public access to federally funded research (e.g., CRS R42983 ), interoperability (e.g., OAI-ORE , ORCIDs , IIIF ), linked data (e.g., Wikipedia notability guidelines for biographies ),  privacy & surveillance (e.g., eavesdropping Barbies , Ashley Madison data breach , RFC 7624 ), and understanding the personalization algorithms that go into presenting (and thus archiving) the view of the web that you experience (e.g., our 2013 D-Lib Magazine article about mobile vs. desktop & GeoIP ), and much more.  I'm hesitant to try to further summarize his ta

When an archived web page is viewed using the Wayback Machine, the archival datetime is easy to determine from the URI and the Wayback Machine's display.  The archival datetime of embedded resources (images, CSS, etc.) is another story.  And what stories their archival datetimes can tell.  These stories are the topic of my recent research and Hypertext 2015 publication.  This post introduces composite mementos, the evaluation of their temporal (in-)coherence, provides an overview of my research results.   What is a composite memento?   A Memento is an archived copy of web resource ( RFC 7089 )  The datetime when the copy was archived is called its Memento-Datetime .  A composite memento is a root resource such as an HTML web page and all of the embedded resources (images, CSS, etc.) required for a complete presentation.  Composite mementos can be thought of as a tree structure.  The root resource embeds other resources, which may themselves embed resources, etc.  The fi

Two WS-DL classes are offered for Spring 2016: CS 725/825 - Information Visualization , Dr. Weigle CS 432/532 - Introduction to Web Science , Dr. Nelson Information Visualization is being offered both online (CRNs 29183 (HR), 29184 (VA), 29185 (US)) and on-campus (CRN 25511).  Web Science is being offered for the first time with the 432/532 numbers (CRNs 27556 and 27557, respectively), but the class will be similar to the Fall 2014 offering as 495/595 .  --Michael

The primary goal of any alumni association is to maintain and strengthen the ties between its alumni, the community, and the mission of the university. With social media, it's easier than ever to connect with current and former graduates on Facebook , Instagram or Twitter with a simple invitation to "like us" or "follow me." Considering just one of these social platforms, we recently analyzed the Twitter networks of twenty-three (23) Virginia colleges and universities to determine what, if any, social characteristics were shared among the institutions and whether we could gain any insight by examining the public profiles of their respective followers. The colleges of interest, ranked by number of followers in Table 1, vary in size, mission, type of institution, admissions selectivity and perceived prestige. Each of the alumni associations has maintained a Twitter presence for an average of six (6) years. The oldest Twitter account belongs to Roanoke C

From November 2nd through November 5th, Dr. Nelson , Dr. Weigle , and I attended the iPRES2015 conference at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill . This served as a return visit for Drs. Nelson and Weigle; Dr. Nelson worked at UNC through a NASA fellowship and Dr. Weigle received her PhD from UNC. We also met with Martin Klein , a WS-DL alumnus now at the UCLA Library. While the last ODU contingent to visit UNC was not so lucky, we returned to Norfolk relatively unscathed. Cal Lee and Helen Tibbo opened the conference with a welcome on November 3rd, followed by Nancy McGovern 's keynote address delivered with Leo Konstantelos and Maureen Pennock . This was not a traditional keynote, but instead an interactive dialogue in which several challenge areas were presented to the audience, and the audience responded -- live and on twitter -- significant achievements or advances in those challenge areas from #lastyear. For example, Dr. Nelson identified the #iCanHazMemento

Excited to go to @ghc #GHC15 and meet 12,000 women in tech :) @ArabWIC @oducs @WebSciDL — Yasmina Anwar (@yasmina_anwar) October 13, 2015 On October 13-17, the atmosphere at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas was electric with 12,000 women in tech from all around the world attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), the world's largest gathering for women in computing. GHC is presented by the Anita Borg Institute  (ABI) 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. The incredible progress of GHC went from 500 women in technology at 1994 to 12,000 women this year. I was humbled to receive a scholarship from the ABI to attend GHC 2015. I also was thrilled twice before to attend the GHC 2013 in Minnesota and GHC 2014 in Phoenix. This year, I represented