[null, null, null, {"document_url": "http://ws-dl.blogspot.com.es/2011/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zfNKC40ihDs/TgpWEQFsOKI/AAAAAAAAABA/-PHuIloLRWM/s320/image002.jpg", "src": "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zfNKC40ihDs/TgpWEQFsOKI/AAAAAAAAABA/-PHuIloLRWM/s320/image002.jpg", "formatted_filename": "image", "rendered_width": 320, "rendered_height": 200}, null, null, {"document_url": "http://ws-dl.blogspot.com.es/2011/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VxrtJNxKwh4/TgpWLtt5WuI/AAAAAAAAABE/qziMtSSwSNY/s400/image006.png", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VxrtJNxKwh4/TgpWLtt5WuI/AAAAAAAAABE/qziMtSSwSNY/s400/image006.png", "formatted_filename": "image", "rendered_width": 400, "rendered_height": 176}, null, null, null, null, null, null, {"document_url": "http://ws-dl.blogspot.com.es/2011/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tVWmG5vNW-w/TfJt8oJohaI/AAAAAAAAACg/8Yoeka7h6Bk/s200/shrimp.png", "src": "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tVWmG5vNW-w/TfJt8oJohaI/AAAAAAAAACg/8Yoeka7h6Bk/s200/shrimp.png", "formatted_filename": "shrimp"}, null, {"document_url": "http://ws-dl.blogspot.com.es/2011/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9rIWYZ8dNFU/TfJ59oq-uPI/AAAAAAAAACo/WpmP_Em4uJ4/s320/synchronicity_timeline.png", "src": "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9rIWYZ8dNFU/TfJ59oq-uPI/AAAAAAAAACo/WpmP_Em4uJ4/s320/synchronicity_timeline.png", "formatted_filename": "synchronicity timeline"}, null, {"document_url": "http://ws-dl.blogspot.com.es/2011/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--JIi5rJRtlo/TfJ6lAi84zI/AAAAAAAAACw/fjbC339C8l4/s320/synchronicity_keywords.png", "src": "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--JIi5rJRtlo/TfJ6lAi84zI/AAAAAAAAACw/fjbC339C8l4/s320/synchronicity_keywords.png", "formatted_filename": "synchronicity keywords"}, null, {"document_url": "http://ws-dl.blogspot.com.es/2011/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XhDY88Dw-jI/TfJ66cqwFGI/AAAAAAAAAC4/u4B0Jp9ddRY/s320/synchronicity_ei_title.png", "src": "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XhDY88Dw-jI/TfJ66cqwFGI/AAAAAAAAAC4/u4B0Jp9ddRY/s320/synchronicity_ei_title.png", "formatted_filename": "synchronicity ei title"}, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null]


2011-06-23: How Much of the Web is Archived?

There are many questions to ask about web archiving and digital preservation - why is archiving important? what should be archived? what is currently being archived? how often should pages be archived?

The short paper "How Much of the Web is Archived?" (Scott G. Ainsworth, Ahmed AlSum, Hany SalahEldeen, Michele C. Weigle, and Michael L. Nelson), published at JCDL 2011, is our first step at determining to what extent the web is being archived and by which archives.

To address this question, we sampled URIs from four sources to estimate the percentage of archived URIs and the number and frequency of archived versions. We chose 1000 URIs from each of the following sources:
For each of the sample URIs (4000 in all), we used Memento to discover archived versions, or mementos, of the URI.

We categorize the archives as Internet Archive (using the classic Wayback Machine), search engine caches (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!), and other (e.g., Diigo, Archive-It, UK National Archives, WebCite).

Our first set of graphs (click on each graph for a larger version) shows the mementos discovered for each URI, ordered by the first observation date. These are separated by sample set, so the y-axis on each graph runs from 0-1000. Brown dots indicate mementos discovered at the Internet Archive, blue dots indicate those found in search engine caches, and red dots indicate mementos found at other archives.

There are a few interesting observations:

The second set of graphs shows the relationship between the density of mementos for a URI and the URI's age. The x-axis is the estimated creation date of the URI, and the y-axis is the number of mementos found for this URI. Large dots indicate that several URIs had similar creation dates and number of mementos. We show density guidelines for 0.5, 1, and 2 mementos created per month.

From these graphs, we make the following observations:
So, how much of the web is archived? Depends on which "web" you mean. Ahmed presented this work at JCDL 2011. His presentation slides are below:

How Much of the Web is Archived? JCDL 2011

This work supported in part by the Library of Congress and NSF IIS 1009392.


2012-12-27 Update: The long version of this paper has been posted to arXiv, along with the URI datasets described in the paper.
Posted by Michele C. Weigle at 10:30 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: JCDL 2011, Web Archiving

2011-06-29: OAC Demo of SVG and Constrained Targets

Online annotating service is a tool that helps to annotate different resources with different authors and give this annotation a separate URI that can be shared using a Facebook post, blog post, tweet, etc.
Web annotations can be described as a relation between different resources with different media types like text, image, audio, or video. The web annotation service will be able to provide:
Open Annotation Model:
This service will generate annotations that meet the OAC model specification. In an annotation that contains different resources, the OAC will introduce a new resource that describes the relationships between the resources that make the annotation.

A user who is interested in wildlife is browsing a page about elephants in Africa, and he was interested in the map the shows where the elephants live exactly.
The user relates this image to another image that shows how people kill the elephants in order to sell their expensive tusks in another website. Now, the tusks picture annotates the map, and shows the reason behind the decreasing number in elephants in central Africa. The process starts at the client side, where the user creates his annotation using the SVG-Edit. SVG-Edit is an open source plugin that has been designed to create SVG graphs in local desks. SVG-Edit has been modified to meet our requirement where we can edit the graph online and send the results to our annotation online service. SVG will enable the annotator to annotate specific parts of the image using any shape. This will solve the problem of the W3C media fragmentation specification that supports rectangular shapes only. After creating the annotation using the SVG-Edit, the annotation data will be sent to our online service that does the following:

You can check the video (http://bit.ly/Annotate) to watch a demonstration on how this service works.

For more details, you can refer to the paper "Persistent Annotations Deserve New URIs" which has been published in JCDL 2011, and the slides are below:
Persistent Annotations Deserve New URIs
This service will help you in:
This work supported in part by the NSF IIS 1009392.

-- Abdulla
Posted by Alasaadi at 3:54 AM 1 comment: Links to this post Labels: Annotations, Memento, OAC, ORE, Web Archiving


2011-06-18: Report on the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge Conference On June 9-10 I attended the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge Conference in Washington DC, which was a status report of the eight projects selected during the initial 2009 Digging into Data Challenge.

Unfortunately, due to traffic challenges to and from the conference, I was able to catch only one half of the sessions. Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education gives a good summary of the sessions (day 1 and day 2).

The highlights of the sessions I attended included the "Data Mining with Criminal Intent" project (whose poster is shown above), which includes the use of the Voyeur Tools for text collection summarization on the "Old Bailey", a corpus of criminal court proceedings in London 1674-1913. Also interesting was the "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project, which is basically social network analysis based on the letter exchanges of prominent scientists and intellectuals during the 18th century. Also of note was Tony Hey's keynote. Although his video/slides are not yet available from the conference website, you can get an idea of his presentation by looking at his OSCON 2009 presentation (slides, video), although Digging Into Data presentation was more recent and expanded. Interesting projects that I learned of included: Digital Narratives, NodeXL, and Zentity.

The conference had a new-to-me format about which I'm not entirely sure how I feel. The project PIs would present the status and highlights of their projects for 45 minutes, and then a respondent not involved with the project would present a rebuttal / evaluation / response / contextualization. The respondents that I saw were gracious and complimentary, but I heard during the breaks that was not necessarily the case for at least one of the respondents that I missed.

There is a 2011 Digging Into Data Challenge, although with less than a week between the conference and the due date of June 16 it is not clear to me how much the experiences of the previous participants could be incorporated into the 2011 submissions.

Posted by Michael L. Nelson at 1:16 PM 1 comment: Links to this post Labels: Digging Into Data, trip report


2011-06-17: The "Book of the Dead" Corpus We are delighted to introduce the "Book of the Dead", a corpus of missing web pages. The corpus contains 233 URIs all of which are dead meaning they result in a 404 "Page not Found" response. The pages were collected during a crawl conducted by the Library of Congress for web pages related to the topics of federal elections and terror between 2004 and 2006.

We created the corpus to test the performance of our methods to rediscover missing web pages introduced in the paper "Evaluating Methods to Rediscover Missing Web Pages from the Web Infrastructure" published at JCDL 2010. In addition we now thankfully have Synchronicity, a tool that can help overcome the 404 detriment to everyone's browsing experience in real time.

To the best of our knowledge the Book of the Dead is the first corpus of this kind. It is publicly available and we are hopeful that fellow researchers can benefit from it by conducting related work. The corpus can be downloaded at: http://bit.ly/Book-of-the-Dead

And one more thing... not only does the corpus include the missing URIs, it also contains a best guess of what each of the URIs used to be about. We used Amazon's Mechanical Turk and asked workers to guess what the content of the missing pages used to. We only provided the URIs and the general topics elections and terror. The workers were supposed to just analyze the URI and draw their conclusions. Sometime this can be an easy task, for example the URI:


is clearly about an election event in 2004. Maybe one could know that "lp" stands for Libertarian Party and "de" for Delaware. Now this URI makes real sense and most likely "Morris" was a candidate running for office during the elections.

All together the Book of the Dead now offers missing URIs and their estimated "aboutness" which makes it a valuable dataset for retrieval and archival research.

Posted by Martin Klein at 3:43 PM 2 comments: Links to this post Labels: 404 error, book of the dead, data set, rediscover missing web pages
 Labels: 404 error, Add-on, Extension, Firefox, rediscover missing web pages, Synchronicity

Web Science and Digital Libraries

You can also follow us on Twitter: @WebSciDL

-- Michael L. Nelson