Within 15 years the web has grown from a group work tool for scientists at CERN into a global information space with more than a billion users. Currently, it is both returning to its roots as a read/write tool and also entering a new, more social and participatory stage. These trends have led to a feeling that the web is entering a ‘second phase’ – a new, ‘improved’ Web version 2.0. But how justified is this perception?

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What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education

Temporal information retrieval has been a topic of great interest in recent years Its purpose is to improve the effectiveness of information retrieval methods by exploiting temporal information in documents and queries In this article, we present a survey of the existing literature on temporal information retrieval In addition to giving an overview of the field, we categorize the relevant research, describe the main contributions, and compare different approaches We organize existing research to provide a coherent view, discuss several open issues, and point out some possible future research directions in this area Despite significant advances, the area lacks a systematic arrangement of prior efforts and an overview of state-of-the-art approaches Moreover, an effective end-to-end temporal retrieval system that exploits temporal information to improve the quality of the presented results remains undeveloped

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Survey of Temporal Information Retrieval and Related Applications

The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocolwise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a signicant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.

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Memento: Time Travel for the Web

Web archiving has been gaining interest and recognized importance for modern societies around the world. However, for web archivists it is frequently difficult to demonstrate this fact, for instance, to funders. This study provides an updated and global overview of web archiving. The obtained results showed that the number of web archiving initiatives significantly grew after 2003 and they are concentrated on developed countries. We statistically analyzed metrics, such as, the volume of archived data, archive file formats or number of people engaged. Web archives all together must process more data than any web search engine. Considering the complexity and large amounts of data involved in web archiving, the results showed that the assigned resources are scarce. A Wikipedia page was created to complement the presented work and be collaboratively kept up-to-date by the community.

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A survey on web archiving initiatives

This article puts on the agenda one of the fundamental theoretical questions within the emerging field of website history: how can the object of historical study — the website — be delimited? Its focus is on the 'website' artefact as a medium and a text. After elaborating a definition of the website, as well as discussing how the website is distinct from other possible analytical web objects (the web as a whole, web sphere, webpage and textual web element), the article addresses the challenges of delimiting the archived website. Finally, it outlines some of the key issues in a general discussion of website history.

Website history and the website as an object of study

This book assembles contributions from computer scientists and librarians that altogether encompass the complete range of tools, tasks and processes needed to successfully preserve the cultural heritage of the Web. It combines the librarians application knowledge with the computer scientists implementation knowledge, and serves as a standard introduction for everyone involved in keeping alive the immense amount of online information.

Julien Masanès

Papers

Web Archiving