Tracking Web Changes

Client

Tarleton L. Gillespie, Associate Professor, Information Science Department
Email: <tlg28@cornell.edu>

Project

Many people from policy makers to academic researchers track web sites or individual pages watching for changes. This has several aspects: tracking specified pages, storing them, analyzing them for changes, and alerting the user when significant changes are observed.

The client has identified several programs that track specified pages (e.g., http://trackedcontent.com/ and http://www.watchthatpage.com/). The first part of this project is to study the existing programs to see how much of the required functionality they provide. The second part is to develop a general purpose system that emphasizes convenience for the user in setting parameters, monitoring and presenting results.

As an example of the challenges, the concept of "significant change" is hard to define. Since different users will have different definitions, the program will need to provide a set of options.