Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Early November 2013 I gave an invited presentation at the EcoCom conference (picture left) and at the Spreeeforum, an informal gathering of researchers to facilitate knowledge exchange and foster collaborations. EcoCom was organized by Prof. Dr. Michael Herzog and his SPiRIT team  and the Spreeforum was hosted by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Sieck who leads the  INKA research group . Both events were supported by the  Alcatel-Lucent Stiftung for Communications research . In my talks I gave a high-level overview of the state of the art in web archiving, outlined the benefits of the Memento protocol , pointed at issues and challenges web archives face today, and gave a demonstration of the Memento for Chrome extension . Following the talk at the Spreeforum I was asked to give an interview for the German radio station Inforadio  (you may think of it as Germany's NPR). The piece was aired on Monday, November 18th at 7.30am CET. As I had left Germany already I was not able to listen to it li

From Modern Family  to the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo , fans have created a flood of fan-based wikis based on their favorite television, book, and movie series. This dedication to fiction has allowed fans to settle disputes and encourage discussion using these resources. These resources, coupled with the rise in experiencing fiction long after it is initially released, has given rise to another cultural phenomenon: spoilers . Using a fan-based resource is wonderful for those who are current with their reading/watching, but is fraught with disaster for those who want to experience the great reveals  and have not caught up yet. Memento can help here. Above is a video showing how the  Memento Chrome Extension  from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) can be used to avoid spoilers while browsing for information on Downtown Abbey . This wiki is of particular interest because the TV show is released in the United Kingdom long before it is released in other countries . The wiki ha

Herbert and Martin attended the recent Fall 2013 CNI meeting in Washington DC, where they gave an update about the Hiberlink Project (joint with the University of Edinburgh), which is about preserving the referential integrity of the scholarly record. In other words, we link to the general web in our technical publications (and not just other scholarly material) and of course the links rot over time.  But the scholarly publication environment does give us several hooks to help us access web archives to uncover the correct material. As always, there are many slides but they are worth the time to study them.  Of particular importance are slides 8--18, which helps differentiate Hiberlink from other projects, and slides 66-99 which walk through a demonstration of the " Missing Link " concepts (along with the Memento for Chrome extension ) can be used to address the problem of link rot.  In particular, absent specific versiondate attributes on a link, such as: <a vers