LIS 7008 - Information Technologies
Summer 2009 - Section 02
Assignment 2
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/sp09/. 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.
The homework assignment is to use all of these techniques to determine
who is responsible for the content that you see on the site given
above. Describe what you find using each of the five techniques in an html file
(name it as FirstName_LastName_hw2.html, such as John_Smith_hw2.html), also discuss possible causes for the
inconsistencies that you discover. Post the html file on your web site, then email the instructor the
URL for accessing your html file. Do not revise that file for 3 days.
Reminder: your URL is in this format:
http://slis.lsu.edu/faculty/wu/7008/su09/your_folder/FirstName_LastName_hw2.html where your_folder is
your last name followed by your first initial, all in lower case, but probably not case-sensitive; for instance,
John Smith's folder is smithj.
Due: 7:00PM June 15 Monday. Common problems with your html page not showing up on browsers:
- "My URL is not accessible." Please check your folder name and file name in your URL. Some people do not create their
folder names correctly, e.g., smith_j for John Smith. Some people create their file name as ".htm" rather than ".html." It is OK to
create a .htm file, then you need to put the .htm file name in your URL.
- "My URL is accessible, but my browser displays an empty page." Please check your HTML tags. For instance, have you
closed your <title> tag with </title>? Have your closed your <body> tag with </body>, <head> tag with </head>?
- "Firefox can display my html page, but Internet Explorer cannot." Please check your HTML tags. HTML is a loose markup language
which does not require strict syntax, so different broswers may interpret it differently. So you need to check your page with
both Firefox and Internet Explorer. I use Internet Explorer to grade your work.
Acknowledgment to Doug Oard, revised by Yejun Wu.