A method for identifying personalized representations in web archives

Abstract

Web resources are becoming increasingly personalized - two different users clicking on the same link at the same time can see content customized for each individual user. These changes result in multiple representations of a resource that cannot be canonicalized in Web archives. We identify characteristics of this problem by presenting a potential solution to generalize personalized representations in archives. We also present our proof-of-concept prototype that analyzes WARC (Web ARChive) format files, inserts metadata establishing relationships, and provides archive users the ability to navigate on the additional dimension of environment variables in a modified Wayback Machine. © 2013 Mat Kelly, Justin F. Brunelle, Michele C. Weigle and Michael L. Nelson.