About the Web Lab
The Cornell Web Laboratory is a joint project of Cornell University and the Internet Archive to provide data and computing tools for research about the Web and the information on the Web. Early users include computer scientists with interests in the structure and evolution of the Web, and social scientists who see the Web as both a fascinating social phenomenon and a source of information about contemporary social events. Although based at Cornell, the Web Lab is designed for use by researchers from other universities and research centers.
Background articles
For an overview of the Web Lab and the research that is it is designed to support, read the paper in D-Lib Magazine, February 2006. For information about the technical aspects of building the library, there is a paper in the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 2006.
Participants
The Web Lab is built on the historical collections of the Internet Archive. The computing facilities are based at the Cornell Theory Center. Support for the lab comes from members of the Information Science program and the Computer Science department.
Development of the Web Lab is a joint effort with two interdisciplinary projects, the PetaByte Storage Services project, which is an infrastructure project to support data-driven science, and the Next Generation Cyberinfrastructure project based in Sociology.
Acknowledgments
This work would not be possible without the forethought and longstanding commitment of the Internet Archive to capture and preserve the content of the Web for future generations.
This work is funded in part by National Science Foundation grants CNS-0403340, DUE-0127308, SES-0537606, and IIS 0634677. The Web Lab is an NSF Next Generation Cyberinfrastructure project. Additional support comes from Unisys, Microsoft and Dell.