Archiving the Relaxed Consistency Web

The historical, cultural, and intellectual importance of archiving the web has been widely recognized. Today, all countries with high Internet penetration rate have established high-profile archiving initiatives to crawl and archive the fast-disappearing web content for long-term use. As web technologies evolve, established web archiving techniques face challenges. This paper focuses on the potential impact of the relaxed consistency web design on crawler driven web archiving. Relaxed consistent websites may disseminate, albeit ephemerally, inaccurate and even contradictory information. If captured and preserved in the web archives as historical records, such information will degrade the overall archival quality. To assess the extent of such quality degradation, we build a simplified feed-following application and simulate its operation with synthetic workloads. The results indicate that a non-trivial portion of a relaxed consistency web archive may contain observable inconsistency, and the inconsistency window may extend significantly longer than that observed at the data store. We discuss the nature of such quality degradation and propose a few possible remedies.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, CIKM 201

A Brief History of Web Crawlers

Web crawlers visit internet applications, collect data, and learn about new web pages from visited pages. Web crawlers have a long and interesting history. Early web crawlers collected statistics about the web. In addition to collecting statistics about the web and indexing the applications for search engines, modern crawlers can be used to perform accessibility and vulnerability checks on the application. Quick expansion of the web, and the complexity added to web applications have made the process of crawling a very challenging one. Throughout the history of web crawling many researchers and industrial groups addressed different issues and challenges that web crawlers face. Different solutions have been proposed to reduce the time and cost of crawling. Performing an exhaustive crawl is a challenging question. Additionally capturing the model of a modern web application and extracting data from it automatically is another open question. What follows is a brief history of different technique and algorithms used from the early days of crawling up to the recent days. We introduce criteria to evaluate the relative performance of web crawlers. Based on these criteria we plot the evolution of web crawlers and compare their performanc

iCrawl: Improving the Freshness of Web Collections by Integrating Social Web and Focused Web Crawling

Researchers in the Digital Humanities and journalists need to monitor, collect and analyze fresh online content regarding current events such as the Ebola outbreak or the Ukraine crisis on demand. However, existing focused crawling approaches only consider topical aspects while ignoring temporal aspects and therefore cannot achieve thematically coherent and fresh Web collections. Especially Social Media provide a rich source of fresh content, which is not used by state-of-the-art focused crawlers. In this paper we address the issues of enabling the collection of fresh and relevant Web and Social Web content for a topic of interest through seamless integration of Web and Social Media in a novel integrated focused crawler. The crawler collects Web and Social Media content in a single system and exploits the stream of fresh Social Media content for guiding the crawler.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 15th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 201

Design and Implementation of the UniProt Website

The UniProt consortium is the main provider of protein sequence and annotation data for much of the life sciences community. The "www.uniprot.org":http://www.uniprot.org website is the primary access point to this data and to documentation and basic tools for the data. This paper discusses the design and implementation of the new website, which was released in July 2008, and shows how it improves data access for users with different levels of experience, as well as to machines for programmatic access