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Virginia Tech

Large Web Archive Collection Infrastructure and Services

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

The web has evolved to be the primary carrier of human knowledge during the information age. The ephemeral nature of much web content makes web knowledge preservation vital in preserving human knowledge and memories. Web archives are created to preserve the current web and make it available for future reuse. A growing number of web archive initia- tives are actively engaging in web archiving activities. Web archiving standards like WARC, for formatted storage, have been established to standardize the preservation of web archive data. In addition to its preservation purpose, web archive data is also used as a source for research and for lost information recovery. However, the reuse of web archive data is inherently challenging because of the scale of data size and requirements of big data tools to serve and analyze web archive data efficiently. In this research, we propose to build web archive infrastructure that can support efficient and scalable web archive reuse with big data formats like Parquet, enabling more efficient quantitative data analysis and browsing services. Upon the Hadoop big data processing platform with components like Apache Spark and HBase, we propose to replace the WARC (web archive) data format with a columnar data format Parquet to facilitate more efficient reuse. Such a columnar data format can provide the same features as WARC for long-term preservation. In addition, the columnar data format introduces the potential for better com- putational efficiency and data reuse flexibility. The experiments show that this proposed design can significantly improve quantitative data analysis tasks for common web archive data usage. This design can also serve web archive data for a web browsing service. Unlike the conventional web hosting design for large data, this design primarily works on top of the raw large data in file systems to provide a hybrid environment around web archive reuse. In addition to the standard web archive data, we also integrate Twitter data into our design as part of web archive resources. Twitter is a prominent source of data for researchers in a vari- ety of fields and an integral element of the web's history. However, Twitter data is typically collected through non-standardized tools for different collections. We aggregate the Twitter data from different sources and integrate it into the suggested design for reuse. We are able to greatly increase the processing performance of workloads around social media data by overcoming the data loading bottleneck with a web-archive-like Parquet data format.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Doctor of Philosophy
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science and Applications
Department dc:contributor.department
Computer Science and Applications
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2023

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Wang, Xinyue
Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Fox, Edward A.
  • Xie, Zhiwu
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Lourentzou, Ismini
  • Eldardiry, Hoda
  • Chen, Jiangping

Subjects

dc:subject × 3

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Language dc:language.iso
en

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:36218
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/113345

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Wang, Xinyue. Large Web Archive Collection Infrastructure and Services. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2023. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/113345