Profiling Web Archival Voids for Memento Routing
This work addresses the incremental improvement of web archive routing accuracy for researchers and archivists by complementing existing archival holdings profiles.
The paper tackles the problem of improving memento aggregator accuracy by defining and profiling archival voids, which represent URI spaces not present in a web archive, and finds that using such profiles could avoid over 8% additional false positives on top of a prior 60% accuracy from archival holdings profiling.
Prior work on web archive profiling were focused on Archival Holdings to describe what is present in an archive. This work defines and explores Archival Voids to establish a means to represent portions of URI spaces that are not present in a web archive. Archival Holdings and Archival Voids profiles can work independently or as complements to each other to maximize the Accuracy of Memento Aggregators. We discuss various sources of truth that can be used to create Archival Voids profiles. We use access logs from Arquivo.pt to create various Archival Voids profiles and analyze them against our MemGator access logs for evaluation. We find that we could have avoided more than 8% of additional False Positives on top of the 60% Accuracy we got from profiling Archival Holdings in our prior work, if Arquivo.pt were to provide an Archival Voids profile based on URIs that were requested hundreds of times and never returned any success responses.