Adding the Dimension of Time to HTTP

Abstract

IntroductIon While the web is distributed, most web archives are centralized silos that do not cooperate with each other. This is partially because the technology that is necessary to replay the archived content and keep it from being influenced by material on the live web also makes it difficult for web archives to cooperate. The Memento Protocol (which we played a central role in defining) addresses this problem by defining an extension to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows for standardized, machine-readable integration of both the past web and the present web. The Memento Protocol extends the concept of HTTP content negotiation to include not only well-known dimensions such as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) types (e.g., JPEG vs. PNG) and file encodings (e.g., gzip vs. compress), but also the dimension of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as a universal versioning system. The protocol can be supported by all systems that hold temporal 14 BK-SAGE-BRUGGER_MILLIGAN-180264-Chp14.indd 189

Aggregator Reuse and Extension for Richer Web Archive Interaction

“…The process of aggregation can be complex [19], both in programmatic logic to accomplish it as well as largely so in the temporal, spatial, and computational requirements. In conventional practice (Section 4.2), upon receiving a request, an aggregator will then send a request to each web archive, as defined by the endpoints in the aggregator's configuration.…”

The Past Web

“…The Wayback Machine hosted by the Internet Archive is Memento-compliant, but the protocol is also supported across all popular web archiving platforms (e.g., Open-Wayback, pywb (Kreymer, 2019)). More than 20 web archives support Memento , http://mementoweb.org/depot/ including Arquivo.pt (Melo et al, 2016) and archive.today (Nelson, 2013). The Memento Protocol does not require that the URIs listed in a TimeMap come from the same archive.…”