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Showing posts from April, 2014

2014-04-18: Grad Cohort Workshop (CRA-W) 2014 Trip Report

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Last week on April 10-11, 2014 I attended the Graduate Cohort Workshop  2014 that took place at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. While there, I  enjoyed the nice weather of California and saw the home to the headquarters of several high-tech companies. CRA-W (Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research) sponsors  a number of activities focused on helping graduate students succeed in CSE research careers. These include educational and community building events, and mentoring. The event was part  of CRA-W, which has several goals, including  (1) increase the number of women in computing (2) provide strategies and information on navigating graduate school (3) early insight into career paths (4) meet others, speaker, graduate students, networking among others and among others. Women students in their first, second or third year of graduate school in computer science and engineering or a closely related field, who are studying at a US

2014-04-17: TimeGate Design Options For MediaWiki

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We've been working on the development, testing, and improvement of the Memento MediaWiki Extension .  One of our principle concerns is performance. The Memento MediaWiki Extension supports all Memento concepts : Original Resource (URI-R) - in MediaWiki parlance referred to as a "topic URI" Memento (URI-M) - called "oldid page" in MediaWiki TimeMap (URI-T) - analogous to the MediaWiki history page, but in a machine readable format TimeGate (URI-G) - no native equivalent in MediaWiki; acquires a datetime from the Memento client, supplies back the appropriate URI-M for the client to render This article will focus primarily on the TimeGate (URI-G), specifically the analysis of two different alternatives in the implementation of TimeGate.  In this article we use the following terms to refer to these two alternatives: Special:TimeGate - where we use a MediaWiki Special Page to act as a URI-G explicitly URI-R=URI-G - where a URI-R acts as a URI-G if it det

2014-04-01: Yesterday's (Wiki) Page, Today's Image?

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Web pages, being complex documents, contain embedded resources like images.  As practitioners of digital preservation well know, ensuring that the correct embedded resource is captured when the main page is preserved presents a very difficult problem.  In  A Framework for Evaluation of Composite Memento Temporal Coherence , Scott Ainsworth, Michael L. Nelson, and Herbert Van de Sompel explore this very concept. Figure 1: Web Archive Weather Underground Example Showing the Different Ages of Embedded Resources In Figure 1, borrowed from that paper, we see a screenshot of the  Web Archive's December 9, 2004 memento from Weather Underground .  Even though the age of most of these embedded images differ greatly from the main page, they don't really impact its meaning.  Of interest is the weather map that differs by 9 months, which shows clear skies even though the forecast of the main page calls for clouds and light rain. The Web Archive, as a service external to the resour