Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Mat Kelly and various other graduate students in the state of Virginia present their graduate research at the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.                            On Friday, April 17, 2015 I attended the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) Student Research Conference at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) in Hampton, Virginia. This conference is slightly beyond the scope of what we at ODU WS-DL ( @webscidl ) usually investigate, as the research requirement was that it was relevant to NASA's objectives as a space agency. My previous work with LaRC's satellite imagery allowed me to approach the imagery files with the perspective a computational scientist. More on my presentation, "Facilitation of the A Posteriori Replication of Web Published Satellite Imagery" below . The conference started off with registration and a provided...

I attended the 2013 Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) Conference on September 22-26 in Valletta, Malta .  Although I've had papers at several of the prior TPDL (known as ECDL prior to 2011) conferences , I think this is the first one I've personally attended since ECDL 2005 in Austria.  Normally I prefer to send students to present their papers, but this year we had five full papers accepted, so I could not afford to send all the students and I went in their stead.  An unfortunate side effect of having so many papers is that between preparation and my own presentations I was unable to see as much of the conference as I would have liked. The conference began with Herbert Van de Sompel and I giving a tutorial about ResourceSync .  Attendees registered for all tutorials and were free to attend whichever one they preferred.  We had as many as ten people in ours at one point, but more importantly we had some key people present who will be imple...

 On March 21 & 22 members of the ResourceSync technical group met in Ann Arbor Michigan to work the 0.5 version of the ResourceSync specification .  In case you're not familiar, ResourceSync is a framework, intended to replace OAI-PMH , for specifying how a destination ("harvester" in PMH terms) can synchronize the web resources of a source ("repository" in PMH terms).  The source publishes a list of resources that it makes available via ResourceSync (which may be a subset of valid resources at the web site) using Sitemaps , with the idea that if you're already using Sitemaps then you are already minimally compliant, and the more advanced features of ResourceSync also use the Sitemap syntax for consistency.  Although the syntactic details are in flux, Herbert's presentation at the September 2012 NISO Forum is a good introduction the framework, as are the two recent D-Lib Magazine articles ( Sept/Oct 2012 and Jan/Feb 2013 ).  Some important ...

During September 10-11, 2012 I attended the UNC/NSF Workshop Curating for Quality: Ensuring Data Quality to Enable New Science in Arlington.  The structure of the workshop was to invite about 20 researchers involved with all aspects of data curation and solicit position papers in one of four broad topics: data quality criteria and contexts human and institutional factors tools for effective and painless curation metrics Although the majority of the discussion was about science data, my position paper was about the importance of archiving the web.  In short, treating the web as the corpus that should be retained for future research.  The pending workshop report will have a full list of participants and their papers, but in the meantime I've uploaded to arXiv my paper, " A Plan for Curating `Obsolete Data or Resources' ", which is a summary version of the slides I presented at the Web Archiving Cooperative meeting this summer.  To be included in the works...

On March 6, 2012 we had a ResourceSync telecon for the purpose of explaining the goals of the project, some preliminary technology explorations, as well as soliciting potential partners in the development of a NISO standard . The project is joint between NISO and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation . The details of the project are yet to be decided, but the focus is on exploring differing modalities for change notification (CN) and content transfer (CT). We are exploring a variety of push technologies to augment conventional harvesting technologies (e.g., RSS, Atom, OAI-PMH). More details can be found in the slides Herbert and Rob covered during the telecon: ResourceSync: Conceptual and Technical Problem Perspective from Herbert Van de Sompel The ResourceSync team had a face-to-face meeting in Baltimore, February 2-3, 2012 where we settled on some of the basic project parameters and discussed an early prototype. Prior t...