BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology

This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

Technological foundations of the current blogosphere

In this paper, we review the technological foundations of the current Blogosphere. The review is primarily based on a large-scale evaluation of active blogs. The extensive list of examined technologies enables commenting on a range of widely adopted standards and potential trends in the Blogosphere. The evaluation has been conducted in the following stages: 1. Retrieving and parsing a large set of blogs 2. Identifying and quantifying the use of technologies such as web standards, adopted services, file formats and platforms. 3. Analysing collected data and reporting the results 4. Comparing the results with existing findings from the generic Web to identify similarities and differences in the Blogosphere. The presented work was performed as part of BlogForever (ICT No. 269963), an EC funded research project aiming to aggregate, preserve, manage and disseminate blogs. The results of this study are relevant within the context weblog preservation and weblog data extractio