Michael Lloyd Nelson, PhD - US grants

This project is building an Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant federated digital library with an emphasis on physics for the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL). This physics digital library will federate holdings from the physics e-print server arXiv (http://arXiv.org), Physical Review D from the American Physical Society (http://prd.aps.org), and the collected holdings from the Technical Report Interchange (TRI) project (http://egbert.cs.odu.edu/tri/html/). TRI includes reports from the NASA Langley Research Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Other holdings are being imported from the Arc project (http://arc.cs.odu.edu).

To federate collections with varying degrees of richness of metadata elements poses a number of challenging questions, which the investigators are addressing, in the areas of resource discovery, creation and maintenance of harvested metadata, and economic sustainability. Regarding resource discovery:

(1) How do we enable users to search across diverse collections within one common interface without losing the ability of searching with richer metadata elements for collections that support them?
(2) How do we address the lack of a uniform controlled vocabulary?
(3) How do we map the user's view of the domain into the metadata models of the participating archives?

Regarding creation and maintenance:

(1) What is the most effective way of keeping the metadata between data providers and the federation service consistent almost all the time? Are the current OAI protocols sufficiently developed and robust enough to support the consistency?
(2) How do we address the dynamic nature of the collections?

The Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in NSF's Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences is providing significant co-funding for this project in recognition of its emphasis on developing collections and services in the area of physics.

This project aims to develop a framework and tools for defining, describing and supporting the publication and dissemination requirements of community digital libraries. It also expects to package the tools and software to create a general solution for implementation and deployment of resources for diverse communities. The promise in the approach is that publishing and dissemination will become more sustainable and effective by moving responsibilities to the author. Four test deployments will be done involving the US Geological Survey, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Open Language Archives community and selected computer science departments already involved with NCSTRL-OAI. Monitoring usage will be a part of the overall effort.

The prevailing model for digital preservation is that archives should be similar to a fortress: a large, protective infrastructure to protect a relatively small collection of data from attack by external forces. If data objects were not tethered to repositories, can we create objects that preserve themselves more effectively than repositories or web infrastructure can?

Intellectual Merit

This project will advance the science and engineering of digital preservation in several areas: complex digital object metadata formats, web object design, P2P algorithms, automatic format migration and object repository interaction. Some areas, such as the format migration services and migration preference language will be new contributions. Other areas will be a matter of novel adaptation, integration and deployment. Technical highlights of this proposal include:

i) Adopting flocking rules for data objects in digital libraries (DLs), thus allowing complex emergent behavior of the archived data objects from a small number of simple, easily implemented rules. ii) Making data objects responsible for the conversion and translation of their own holdings according to preferences that were specifed at creation time. The data objects will rely on transient, network-accessible services that are not attached to repositories. iii) Creating a preservation testbed with real content in self-preserving digital objects, repositories, and in the general web.

Broader Impacts

In many ways, creating and integrating the technology necessary for self-preservation will be straight-forward; raising peoples' expectations from passive digital objects to self-preserving digital objects will be the biggest challenge. For this reason, a series of longitudinal experiments about preservation in general as well as self-preserving digital objects will be integrated across the four-year undergraduate computer science curriculum at Old Dominion University. The complimentary relationship between preservation and software engineering will be stressed. The content will be of interest to students, thereby avoiding listless, perfunctory participation. One example will include preserving copies of old tests, assignments and projects content the students will be highly motivated to preserve. This kind of preservation (digital or nondigital) is already performed to some extent by fraternities and other memory organizations. This process will be codified and democratized with the appropriate information technology tools. The experiences reported by the students will be incorporated into future versions of the preservation software.

Web Science is an emerging discipline that studies the Web: how human activity is shaped by Web interactions, how the Web can benefit society, and how Web technologies can be improved. Central to Web Science is access to data that records the history of the Web, as well as data that records human activity (e.g., posed queries, tagged pages, Twitter updates). It is currently very difficult for academic researchers to obtain such Web data because it is hard to locate, it is fragmented across diverse sites, and is recorded using inconsistent formats and strategies. This project will build a Web Archive Cooperative (WAC) that will integrate existing archives (repositories of Web data), making it feasible to access large volumes of data in a simplified fashion. The WAC will be a virtual service, providing search facilities and access mechanisms to existing resources. These resources will not just be Web pages, but all types of available Web information, such as query logs, tag annotations, blogs, profiles and Twitter updates. Furthermore, resources will also include the software tools for building and managing Web archives.

The project will explore three goals for a resource discovery service: (1) the manual or automated discovery of entire existing Web related archives; (2) the selection among known archives of the ones that support a specific research question; and (3) the identification of individual resources from within the selected archives. Tools for characterizing discovered archives, especially for the case where the archive does not provide rich descriptive metadata, will also be developed. Characterization of an archive includes elements such as an estimate of the archive's coverage, particulars of the crawling parameters, like dates/frequencies, crawl duration, depth, per-site ceiling on the number of collected pages, content statistics, and link structure. Mechanisms for integrating diverse archives will be developed, and the mechanisms will be applied to site reconstruction (from various archives) and archive views (a logical fusion of resources from multiple sources). Since integration issues are so challenging, an experimental testbed will be set up with small but diverse resources. The testbed will contain several crawls of the same target sites, each obtained with different crawlers and using different parameters. The testbed will also contain related resources. Storage trading schemes will be developed, allowing members to trade local backup space for remote space. A Web archive replication tool will be developed based on existing notions for self-preserving objects. Alternatives for replica synchronization will be studied.

Workshops to bring together key Web Science researchers will be organized to discuss available resources and impediments to sharing. These workshops will drive research and identify needed tools and protocols. With small groups of participants, challenge problems will be established, e.g., combining a set of Web archives. Reports of these results at future workshops can incentivize others to participate in the WAC. In addition, an Advisory Board of industrial, government, and academic experts has been set up to guide the project. A Summer Institute for Web Science graduate students will be held. At this Institute, students will learn to use the latest tools and will learn from each other's experiences in dealing with Web data. In addition, a one-day workshop will be developed, to be offered at Web Science conferences (WWW, SIGIR, etc.) to educate participants about WAC resources. An undergraduate Web Sciences track for computer science majors will be set up, taking advantage of WAC resources. The project will have impact in two ways. First, it will provide tools and services that facilitate access to Web resources. Any researcher, from a computer scientist studying efficient Web search, to a social scientist studying how human beliefs are changing today, to a historian studying how the early Web evolved, to a biologist understanding how disease spreads, will benefit from the work. Second, the project motivates students and young researchers to stay in academia. Currently top talent is flowing to industry because only they have comprehensive Web data, and it is so hard to do significant Web Science at universities. The WAC can provide an alternative, attracting more researchers and teachers to this important area.

Workshop: 2011 NSF CAREER Proposal Writing Workshop

Abstract
An NSF CAREER Proposal Writing Workshop will be held on April 15, 2011 (tentative), at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA. The objective of this workshop is to enable future CISE proposal submitters to prepare competitive CAREER proposals. The major components of the workshop include presentations on NSF proposal guideline and proposal writing, experience sharing, mock panels, and proposal clinic. The workshop intends to provide young faculty with skills in proposal writing, panel review experience, and opportunities to interact with NSF program directors and recent NSF CAREER awardees. This workshop will also provide travel support to encourage junior faculty members at HBCU/MEI to participate the NSF CAREER proposal writing practice.
Intellectual merit

Major activities of the workshop include: presentations by NSF program directors, invited speakers, and recent NSF CAREER awardees; mock panel review sessions; interactions among workshop participants, NSF program directors, and recent NSF CAREER awardees; and proposal clinic. The workshop materials will be available in workshop website and the presentations in the workshop will be podcasted via the internet.

Broader impacts

The workshop will be open to participants from U.S. national universities (including HBCU/MEI). About 100 junior faculty members (about 16 or more of them are from HBCU/MEI) across the nation are expected to attend the workshop. They will learn the guidelines and obtain experience of writing a competitive NSF CAREER proposal. This will positively affect these young faculty members at their early career stage to develop their academic career as outstanding researchers and educators.

This award supports participation of doctoral students for 12 Ph.D. students in the disciplines of computer science and library and information science in the Doctoral Consortium, June 10, 2012 and the 2012 ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2012), to be held at The George Washington University, June 11-14, 2012 (http://www.jcdl2012.info). Twelve selected students are in the early stages of their dissertation work and include several international students in order to provide breadth in exchanging ideas. The goal of the consortium is to help these students develop their dissertation proposals and research plans through feedback and guidance from prominent professors and experienced practitioners from the field of digital library research and development. The JCDL Doctoral Consortium provides a forum for Ph.D. students to interact with major figures in the digital library community. These leaders, who come from all over the world, exemplify a broad set of expertise, diversity of perspectives, and wealth of knowledge. The consortium provides students with an opportunity to have broad audience and interact intellectually with professionals who would otherwise be difficult to meet with and discuss their ideas. Participating students will be selected on the basis of a paper describing their research and broaden participation and those selected for the consortium will have approximately 40 minutes to present their research plans and receive feedback from the panel. After the consortium the students will revise their papers based on the consortium's feedback and then they will be published in the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries publication "TCDL Bulletin" (http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/mediawiki/TCDL/index.php/IEEE-TCDL).

The JCDL 2012 Doctoral Consortium will expose promising Ph.D. students to a larger community, extend their opportunities for intellectual engagement, and encourage scholarly discourse and networking among new entrants into the field. An intended outcome of the workshop is to help shape ongoing and future teaching, research, and development projects in the field of digital libraries by providing wider exposure for the students to innovative ideas which may generate new research questions in the future, and to foster a sense of community among these young researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. The organizers will also take special steps to solicit participation from institutions with underrepresented groups to extend the potential benefits and broaden the horizon of expertise in the field.

Web archiving is a thriving activity, but remains at the fringes of the larger web community. Web archiving often runs into two opinions: (1) who cares about the past? and (2) hasn't the Internet Archive solved this already? While the Internet Archive is the cornerstone of web archiving, there remains much work to be done to align archiving with the larger web community. The PIs will investigate a collection of methods and concepts to accelerate the adoption and utility of web archives. While there are more than a dozen publicly available web archives (including the Internet Archive) that are simultaneously accessible via the Memento protocol, these archives are mostly underutilized because they lack the APIs and services to be of greater immediate use to the live web. For example, rather than returning "HTTP 404" responses for pages that are not archived, the archives can introspect on their collections for replacement or similar pages. This project will research: (1) extended APIs for archives; (2) models and methods for archival quality; and (3) user tools and techniques for exploring and understanding temporality on the web. The broader impacts of this research will include increasing the ability of archives to record today's social discourse, which primarily occurs on the web, oftentimes with print or TV as secondary. The ability to publish data on the web far outstrips the ability to archive it for posterity. There are a number of public web archives that are doing yeoman's work saving as much material as they can, but saving is only a precondition for later use. Mostly these archived web pages are being underutilized, only because the tools for extracting the value from these archives are lacking. This project will research and build the tools, infrastructure, and methods to better utilize, understand, and interact with the archived materials that we already have.

Aside from their crawling, archives are mostly passive collections of content that offer little in the way of services other than answering "yes" or "no" to a request for an archived page. Even with the increased rate of archiving (and a greater number of active web archives), there is little analysis on the web archives to provide better services for incoming requests. The PIs will build on their prior API work to explore recommendation services for web pages, where even if an archive does not have the requested web page it can make recommendations for a replacement page based on content and link analysis. This will prevent the web archives from being a dead end if they do not have the requested page. The PIs will also perform fundamental research on the issue of the quality of the reconstructed page, a topic that has been mostly ignored. In particular the PIs are concerned with detecting and resolving "temporal violations," combinations of HTML pages with embedded resources that are presented to the user as an historical page but in fact they never existed in that combination on the live web. This occurs in at least 5% of the pages replayed through the Internet Archive. The other aspect of quality research deals with automatically assessing how damaged an archived page is with respect to its missing embedded resources. Straight percentages (e.g., this page is missing 3 of 57 embedded resources) do not tell the whole tale, but there are automated methods that can be used to estimate how important the resource was (even though you do not have it) to the rendered page. This will allow large-scale assessment not only of pages, but of archive-wide performance for comparable time periods. Lastly, the PIs will focus on tools and methods for allowing users to better understand and interact with the archived web and temporal concepts in general. Users' understanding of temporal concepts is not well advanced, in part because the tools are not in place to allow them to better understand and build models for interaction. For further information see the web site at: http://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/.