LIS 7008 - Information Technologies
Fall 2009 - Section 01
Assignment 2

This homework is due on your course web site before the beginning of next class session. Partial credit may be awarded.

As a reference librarian or information user, sometimes you want to find authoritative information on the Web for users or for yourself. The purpose of this exercise is to learn the techniques for identifying who is responsible for the content of a Web page.

I have encountered an interesting Web page at http://www.flyonthewall.tv/casestudies.php?site=5, and would like to know more about the people or the organization that are responsible for the content on this site. We know at least five ways to find out who really runs a site, so lets give them a try:

• By following links from that Web page, see if you can find a page on the same site that makes a claim of organizational or individual responsibility for the content on the site.
• Sometimes no appropriate links are provided. In such cases, URL trimming sometimes offers a way of finding a page on which a claim of responsibility is made. The idea is to remove parts of the URL starting at the right until you get to a page where such a claim is made. For example, the Web page for section 01 of this course is http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~wuyj/Teaching/7008/fa09/. URL trimming would eventually get you back to http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~wuyj, where you would be redirected to my home page. Overtrimming to http://www.csc.lsu.edu/ would be less useful in this case, since the CSC server hosts unrelated information from many people.
• Sometimes it is not possible to find anything that resembles a claim of responsibility, and sometimes that claim may be misleading (for example, if you found a Web page from the "Committee to Re-Elect the President," you might want to know something more about that organization). One way to do that is to look at the domain name registry to see where the domain name is registered. Sometimes you will find the full domain name registered, other time you may find that only a part of the name is registered. In this case, you want to trim the URL from the right until you get to the domain name, and then trim the domain name from the left ("www.umiacs.umd.edu" would become "umiacs.umd.edu" and then "umd.edu"). A useful site for looking up domain names is http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
• Some top-level domain names are assigned to organizations (the U.S. government owns ".gov," for example) or to countries (the United Kingdom owns ".uk"). So in this case it would be useful to know who owns ".tv". If you do much of this, you will learn to recognize some of the more common top-level domain names. There are a lot of lists that provide this sort of information; one can be found (with some poking around) at http://www.iana.org/.
• Ultimately, the packets that you send to a host have to know how to get there. You can follow that path using a "traceroute" service. One such service is "visual traceroute" at http://visualroute.visualware.com/, which provides quite a lot of detail on how packets get from near Dulles Airport in Virginia (if you select "from this server") to any site you specify.