hanzo:archives, the web archiving company

LONDON, 8th February 2008

Hanzo is delighted to be the commercial Web Archiving business partner to collaborate on the Europe-wide Living Web Archives project. This 3-year project is funded by the European Union through their 7th Research Framework Programme.

The objective of the Living Web Archives project is to develop the next generation Web Archiving methods and tools that capture all types of content in its dynamic and hidden form. In contrast with the commonly used "freeze" of Web content "snapshots", the LiWA approach will transform content storage into a "Living" web archive.

“Living”, as the term itself implies, refers to:

1. long term interpretability in its evolving form;
2. improved archive fidelity by eliminating irrelevant noise; and
3. widening of the scope to include a wide variety of content

At the end of the project, LIWA will deliver the next generation of Web content capture, preservation, analysis and enrichment services that will dramatically improve fidelity, coherence and interpretability of its archives.

How does Liwa intend to achieve this ambitious and state-of-the-art project?

LiWA is a collaboration of expert partners in their field:

• L3S Research Centre in Hannover, Germany;
• The European Archive, Paris, France;
• The Max Planck Institut for Computer Science in Saarbrücken, Germany;
• The Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary;
• The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision in Hilversum, The Netherlands;
• Hanzo Archives Limited in London, England;
• The National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague, the Czech Republic;
• The Moravian Library in Kounicova, the Czech Republic.

The project will be rolled out over the next three years delivering tools and services that:

1. will reduce the amount of fake content by detecting spam and prioritising crawls that detect content value;
2. will improve content positioning in time and space with faster access to an evolving web content;
3. has applied methods for semantic and terminology extraction so as to detect and handle evolving semantics and the interpretations of terminology thereby preserving the usefulness, quality and accessibility of the archives over time.

The developed Liwa service will be demonstrated through two applications that will focus on the Social Web and on the archiving of Audio Visual content.

The benefits of this project is essentially twofold: archiving institutions will be able to archive higher volumes of volatile and dynamic digital content and archive users will benefit from higher quality of archive content and improved search facilities.

For more information on Living Web Archives, please visit: http://www.liwa-project.eu/.