More New Mexico photos

I just got back from taking Becky and Ethan to the airport. I'll be here in Los Alamos another week while they're soaking up the Arkansas humidy. Here's some photos from the past few weeks.

Celebrating our anniversary in Chimayo	Enjoying the back porch
Cool kid	Outside our apartment
Exploring the globe with buddy Cade	My neighbor's not an avid biker
Hiking with the family	Looking manly (stupid?) with buddy Kent

ORE and preservation

Our network is down, so I thought this would be a good time to share what it is exactly I've been doing this summer at LANL. I'm working with the Digital Library Research and Prototyping team, led by Herbert Van de Sompel, which is located in the back of the Research Library. My work focuses on issues regarding the preservation of ORE Resource Maps. What are ORE Resource Maps? First, some background.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has created the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) project which provides standards for defining and discovering aggregations of web resources. The ORE specs are currently in beta, and the 1.0 spec will be released at the end of Sept. You can read the Primer on-line, but I'll attempt to give the gist of it below.

An aggregation is a collection of web resources that make up a single, conceptual resource. For example, a scholarly publication may consist of several web resources: an HTML "splash page", a PDF version, a slideshow, and the raw data used to perform the research. An aggregation documenting a special event like 9-11 could be composed of images, video footage, news stories, and blog posts. Aggregated resources may reside on the same website, or they may be distributed across a number of websites.

While it's relatively easy for humans to determine the boundaries of an aggregation, it's extremely difficult for a computer. So the ORE Model introduces the concept of a Resource Map (ReM), a web resource that acts as an organizational unit, defining the boundaries of an aggregation and indicating the relationships between the aggregated resources. A computer can read a ReM and know for certain which resources belong together.

The figure below (taken from the Primer) shows a ReM which describes an aggregation (A-1) composed of three aggregated resources (AR-1, AR-2, AR-3). The relationships between the ReM, aggregation, and aggregated resources are indicated with RDF triples.



ReMs can be represented with RDF/XML, RDFa, and (most simply) with the Atom Syndication Format. An example ReM (borrowed from here using Atom) for a D-Lib magazine article is shown below. The ReM lists four aggregated resources shown in bold.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<atom:entry xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<atom:title>Observed Web Robot Behavior on Decaying Web Subsites</atom:title>
<atom:updated>2007-09-22T07:11:09Z</atom:updated>
<atom:author>
  <atom:name>Michael Nelson</atom:name>
  <atom:uri>http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mln/</atom:uri>
</atom:author>
<atom:author>
  <atom:name>Joan Smith</atom:name>
  <atom:uri>http://www.joanasmith.com/</atom:uri>
</atom:author>
<atom:author>
  <atom:name>Frank McCown</atom:name>
  <atom:uri>http://www.cs.odu.edu/~fmccown/</atom:uri>
</atom:author>

<atom:link  rel="alternate" type="text/html"
  href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/smith/02smith.html" />
<atom:id>http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/smith/aggregation</atom:id>
<atom:link rel="self"
  type="application/atom+xml"
  href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/smith/aggregation.atom" />

<atom:category scheme="http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/"
  term="http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/Aggregation"
  label="Aggregation" />

<atom:link  rel="http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/aggregates" type="text/html"
  href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/smith/02smith.html" />
<atom:link rel="http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/aggregates"  type="text/html"
  href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/smith/pg1-13.html" />
<atom:link rel="http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/aggregates"  type="application/pdf"
  href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/smith/pg1-13.pdf" />
<atom:link rel="http://www.openarchives.org/ore/terms/aggregates"  type="image/png"
  href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/smith/MLN_Google.png" />

<atom:source>
       <atom:author>
           <atom:name>Dlib-Magazine</atom:name>
           <atom:uri>http://www.dlib.org</atom:uri>
       </atom:author>
   </atom:source>
</atom:entry>

So what does this have to do with preservation? You are probably well aware that web pages and entire websites disappear from Web on a regular basis. Because of this, search engines like Google make pages available from their cache, and web archives like the Internet Archive regularly take snapshots of the Web. I like to call these combined preservation efforts the Web Infrastructure (WI).

If you're familiar with my recent work, you know that I created a service called Warrick which uses the WI to reconstruct lost websites. Warrick is used to reconstruct over 100 websites a month.

So what happens if you were to create a ReM, and then the resources you pointed to disappeared or changed? How can we ensure the ReM is accurate at various points in time over its lifetime?

Michael Nelson, my former PhD adviser, suggested we leverage the intelligence of web users to preserve ReMs. If a large community of users put effort into creating and caring for Wikipedia articles, would a community of users also care for ReMs? And could we use the WI in conjunction with the small, distributed actions of this community to curate ReMs?

So this summer I've been building a prototype system called ReMember which demonstrates how we could get general web users to preserve ReMs in the WI. I've written a paper about it (still under review) which I'll make available soon. I'm not sure if I'll be able to make the prototype available to the public, but you can see a screenshot below which shows several aggregated resources from a ReM.


Users are requested to click on resources that are 404 or have undergone significant change. They can use a search engine like Google to find the new location of the missing resource, and they can push copies of resources into the WI. ReMember allows a user to view resources as they existed at various times throughout the lifetime of the ReM.

If you find any of this stuff interesting and want to know more, send me an email.

Our fifth year anniversary

Today Becky and I are celebrating 5 years of marital bliss. OK, it's not all bliss, but it is wonderful being married to Becky. My prayer is that my son might some day find a wife as intelligent, beautiful, and funny as his mom, and someone who encourages him to be faithful to the Lord.

The photo below was taken a few months before our wedding. (Thanks, Jeff.)


To celebrate, we are leaving Ethan with a babysitter and going out to a small town called Chimayo where there's a famous little chapel called Santuario de Chimayó and a romantic restaurant called Ranco de Chimayó Restaurante. Should be a lot of fun.

Los Alamos in the summer

We're half way through our stay here in Atomic City (Los Alamos), and I thought I'd bring everyone up to speed on what we've been doing.

I picked up Becky and Ethan in mid June from the airport in Albuquerque. The first thing Becky noticed was how many of the buildings, especially in Santa Fe, were built in a rather unique Adobe fashion. Yes, even Target:


It took a little adjusting to life in a small apartment with no A/C, but we did it. What really helps is having incredible views all around us



with plenty of places to hike



and play (there are like 10 billion playgrounds)


and a good church which has been very welcoming.

We got Ethan his first haircut just a week after arriving, and despite his facial expression (and the outrageous $16 price), he didn't cry a bit:


So far we've visited a few places including Bandelier National Monument



Taos (where many hippies call home),



and the Albuquerque Zoo (with other moms and kids from church).


I'll report more on our summer in the weeks to follow.

Fav5

Happy Independence Day! My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. The Deep Web is getting a little shallower: Google has recently improved their ability to crawl Flash content. It used to be that a website with a Flash interface was practically invisible to search engine crawlers, but now Google can find the links to other pages within the Flash program and even indexes the program's textual content.


2. If you were late signing up for a free Yahoo email address, you might have ended up with frank1837abc@yahoo.com since all the good names were already taken. But now Yahoo has opened up two new domains under "ymail" and "rocketmail". Although Yahoo is still the email market leader with 266 million worldwide users, they want to stay ahead of Microsoft who is a close second with 264 million.
   


3. Are Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft censoring themselves more than they must in China? According to a report by Citizen Lab, some sites are blocked by some search engines and others let them through. In a test to see how many questionable sites were blocked, Google had censored 15.2% of the sites tested, Microsoft censored 15.7%, Yahoo 20.8%, and Baidu (the most popular Chinese search engine) 26.4%.


4. A Harvard marketing professor takes on Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" theory by analyzing real data about online video rentals and song purchases. Her conclusion is that maybe we aren't as individualistic in our taste as Anderson suggested.
   


5. In the spirit of July 4, read about how LANL scientists are making fireworks a little "greener".

I'm in Los Alamos

I left Friday morning for Los Alamos and arrived Saturday afternoon (I stayed in Amarillo with some friends). This place is incredibly beautiful. Picturesque. I wish I had my digital camera, but I left it back in Arkansas with the wife and kid, just in case Ethan learns to do a one-handed hand stand (wouldn't you want a photo of your 15 month-old doing that?). You can browse some photos at Flickr to get a feel for what it looks like.

Anyway, I got us setup in an apartment and loaded up on groceries. I'm getting the place all setup for Becky and Ethan who are coming up in a few weeks. Also I drove around to get familiar with the layout, and I marveled at the houses that are built literally 2 feet away from a straight drop hundreds of feet into the crevices below.

This morning I worshiped with the Los Alamos Church of Christ; one of their members was once a CS Harding faculty member in the 1980s. Now I'm checking email, etc. at the library. For some reason they are using IE 2.0 on Windows 85 or something, so it's like I've jumped back in time. Each time I press a key, I wait a second for it to appear on the screen... really fun. Also the people around me are giving me looks because I'm apparently typing loudly.

I'm starting work at LANL tomorrow, and hopefully I'll get the Internet turned on at home. It's really boring sitting in an empty apartment with no family, no TV, and no Internet! If any of you get the chance, send Becky an encouraging email or Facebook message... it's tough dealing with a toddler by your lonesome!