Page history explorer: Visualizing and comparing page histories

Abstract

Due to the increased preservation efforts, large amounts of past Web data have been stored in Web archives and other archival repositories. Utilizing this data can offer certain benefits to users, for example, it can facilitate page understanding. In this paper, we propose a system for interactive exploration of page histories. We demonstrate an application called Page History Explorer (PHE) for summarizing and visualizing histories ofWeb pages. PHE portrays the overview of page evolution, characterizes its typical content over time and lets users observe page histories from different viewpoints. In addition, it enables flexible comparison of histories of different pages. © 2011 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.