Open Inside: The Open Source Tools that Power Archive-It Archive-It Partners 2009 Gordon Mohr, Internet Archive November 4, 2009

Archive-It Unifies Many Tools Archive-It: managing, designing, monitoring, scheduling, reporting Integrated Tools: collecting, storing, displaying, searching

Open Source & Standards from IA 3 open source software projects –Heritrix collecting –Wayback displaying –NutchWAX searching 1 co-developed ISO standard –WARC File Format storing

Open Source from Elsewhere Linux Apache/Tomcat MySQL Lucene-Nutch-Hadoop

Why Open Source? Open Source Initiative says: “ Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in. ” More than access to source code: Right to change, reuse, extend Wins: –Harmonize formats, practices –Avoid duplication of effort –Reduce costs

Projects Genesis: 2003 Internet Archive wanted more control over its own software & collections Discussions with national libraries USA, Canada, UK, France, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Italy, Australia Desire to share tools, formats, experiences avoid duplicated effort, closed & inflexible tools Formed: International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC)

Heritrix

What is Heritrix? Open-source Extensible Web-scale Archival-quality Web crawling software

Heritrix Motivations Deeper, specialized, in-house crawling Open source –Encourage collaboration on features and best practices –Avoid duplication of work, incompatibilities Archival-quality –Perfect copies –Keep up with changing web –Meet evolving needs of Internet Archive and International Internet Preservation Consortium

Heritrix Overview Heritrix means heiress Java, modular Project website: –News, downloads, documentation, issue-tracking –Sourceforge: open source hosting site Source-code control (SVN) Official downloads “ Lesser ” GPL or Apache license – easy reuse Outside contributions welcome

Milestones 1.0 release in March 2004 Major releases since: –1.2 new scope options (2004) –1.4 improved memory use (2005) –1.6 remote control (2005) –1.8 scaling (2006) –1.10 protocols, formats, fixes (2006) –1.12 “ smart ” duplicate reduction (2007) –2.0 “ smart ” prioritization (2008) –1.14 WARC, performance ( )

Archive-It Uses Heritrix AKA “ ” WARC/1.0 Many minor fixes Same as all contract/national crawls Available as developer build Will become

Heritrix – future Next major release: Heritrix 3.0 –Crawl configuration by ‘ Spring ’ –Scriptable configuration –Web-service remote control Other upcoming priorities –“ Smart ” continuous/automatic revisits (3.2) (from change detection to prediction) –Rich media improvements –Spam/trap/mirror suppression –Automate ever-larger crawls

Heritrix – more info Project website – Source code –Sourceforge ‘ SVN ’ Discussion – crawler/ crawler/ Issues/Bugs – Key IA staff: –Steve Sisney, Gordon Mohr

Wayback

What is Wayback? Open Source Java Modular Scalable Customizable Web Archive Access Tool

Wayback – the beginning Inception in 2005 –Aim: URL-based browsing ‘ as if ’ at previous dates –Contrasts with classic: Open source, diverse installs Java vs. Perl/C Refactored: –Many extension points –Basis for new features & experiments First release: “ ” December 2005 Now at (July 2009)

Wayback Features Starting with an URL: –See list of captures by date –See extension URLs (same site) –View a capture Once browsing ( “ replay ” ): –Browse web ‘ as it was ’ –Best-match clickthroughs

Wayback: Modular Components Query User Interface –Calendar, Search Engine, XML Replay User Interface –Archival URL, Timeline, Proxy Resource Index –CDX, BDB, Remote, Nutch, Aggregated Resource Store –Local ARC, HTTP 1.1 Remote ARC

Archive-It Uses Wayback UI customized Adds server-side rewriting-mode Available from project source-control Next major release: 1.6.0

Wayback – more info Website – Source code – Sourceforge ‘ SVN ’ Discussion – discusshttps://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/archive-access- discuss Issues/Bugs – Key IA staff: – Brad Tofel

NutchWAX

What is NutchWAX? Open Source Java Full-Text Indexing End-User Querying for Web Archives Built on Lucene/Nutch/Hadoop

NutchWAX Background Lucene –Open-source Java full-text indexing –Popular, mature Nutch –Extensions to Lucene –For web content, access, scale Hadoop –Spun off from Nutch –Inspired by Google ’ s Map-Reduce

NutchWAX Inception in 2005 Nutch Web Archive eXtensions –Utilities for using (W)ARCs as Nutch input –Configuration for date dimension –Handle repeated URLs First release – “ ” – July 2005 –Now at (September 2009)

Archive-It Uses NutchWAX Latest official release Recent changes driven by Archive-It –Caching support –Index maintenance processes (merging) –‘ Reboost ’ for reranking

NutchWAX – more info Website – Source code – Sourceforge ‘ SVN ’ Discussion – discusshttps://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/archive-access- discuss Issues/Bugs – Key IA staff: – Aaron Binns

WARC

What is WARC? IIPC ISO Standard Flexible Simple Format for Web Archive Files (drafts)

WARC Overview WARC = Web ARChive file format Next generation of ARC, called for by IIPC –ARC format created by the Internet Archive –Over 1PB of ARCs gathered since 1996

WARC Goals Store arbitrary metadata (e.g., subject classifier, discovered language, encoding) Data compression and record integrity Store all control information from the harvesting protocol (e.g., request headers) Store the results of data migrations Store a duplicate detection event Distinguishable from the legacy ARC Globally unique record identifiers Deterministic handling of long records (e.g., truncation, segmentation).

ARC vs. WARC Both are a simple sequence of content blocks, each introduced by a small text header ARCs only 1-line header + protocol response WARCs add: –multi-line header with extensible fields –New record types: Request, Response, Resource Metadata, Revisit, Conversion, Warcinfo, Continuation

What does the future hold?

Expand and improve toolset –Driven by user requests, contributions, sponsors –Unify access tools –Verify and improve internationalization

What does the future hold? Keep up with the web –New formats, protocols, design techniques –Content challenges: Deep content Spam Interactive applications / AJAX / Javascript

Thank You Gordon Mohr Internet Archive Web Group

Thank You Gordon Mohr Internet Archive Web Group