Website Reconstruction using the Web Infrastructure

Backup or preservation of websites is often not considered until after a catastrophic event has occurred. In the face of complete website loss, webmasters or concerned third parties may be able to recover some of their website from the Internet Archive. Other pages may also be salvaged from commercial search engine (SE) caches if caught in time. We introduce the concept of “lazy preservation”digital preservation performed as a result of the normal operations of the Web infrastructure (search engines and caches). We will investigate methods of how websites can be automatically reconstructed from the Web infrastructure (WI) by using a web-repository crawler. We propose to evaluate and measure the effectiveness of various web-repository crawler strategies and evaluate various methods for injecting the generative functionality (e.g., CGI programs, databases, etc.) of websites into the WI. We also propose to develop methods for tracking resources as they move through the WI and to characterize SE caches using random sampling.