| Abstract: |
The
World Wide Web (WWW) is continuously evolving to better serve the needs
of internet users. Internet users may now find themselves inundated
with relevant digital information at the click of the mouse. However,
information and WWW pages available to users online on a remote server
today may be gone tomorrow. In order for us to enable users to
efficiently find, use, and retrieve the vast amounts of valuable
information they have collected from the internet, they need effective
web archival tools.
We conducted a small market survey and a comprehensive study of the
web’s archival services which are available today. We examined the
tools and services that web user want in web archival systems and found
that current web archival products provided the basic services and
fared well in most regards except in good user functionality and user
interface design. Most of them for example lack the cataloging and
search functionality and are mainly storing the archival data on the
user’s machine thus limiting its accessibility.
To address to these needs we have designed, developed and tested a
catalog like application for archiving WWW content. This project offers
several novelties. It lets users store and archive their web pages
online on a remote server so that they can access it later on from any
computer connected to the internet. It lets users store their web pages
with their own names and descriptions. It also features a unique option
- it is able to save subsequent version of a given web page over a
specific period of time as per user-determined schedule. It even
notifies the user of any content difference in the recursively archived
web pages. Users can search their archive and even make changes to
their settings. The interface for all these services is very user
friendly. The project is developed on modern WWW architecture using
open source technologies and has easy to use browser based user
interface.
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