Artificial Intelligence processes data from Arquivo.pt

Artificial Intelligence AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI), covers various areas of knowledge, such as linguistics and computing, and is present in the new technologies used by citizens on a daily basis.

For example, when we search for information on the Internet and the computer generates an amazingly accurate response, in a language very close to our own.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is what allows machines to perfect the algorithm that generates these answers tailored to Internet users.

The problem is that natural language processing models have been developed more for the English language and less for Portuguese and other languages with less representation.

The more the processing models are trained on a language, the better they will be able to interpret the complexities of the language. But this is only possible if quality data is available.

Portuguese text collection on Arquivo.pt available for research

Arquivo.pt appears here as the largest Portuguese-language textual dataset in Portugal, available in open access, for researchers to train NLP models.

In recent years, researchers from various research groups and projects have drawn attention to the usefulness of preserved web data for large-scale processing.

Arquivo.pt has more than 1 Petabyte of preserved web content dating back to the 1990s, including everything that can be found on web pages. It’s not just text, but also images, audio files, video, page code and various metadata.

The content is accessible via the search interface and the Arquivo.pt APIs.

In order to make it easier to download archived resources from the web, Arquivo.pt has created indexes for researchers in CDXJ format.

GlórIA, a model for the Portuguese language

One of the projects that used Arquivo.pt to obtain large amounts of text is called GlórIA and is a large-scale language model (LLM) focused on the European Portuguese language.

“Despite the abundance of LLMs for many high-resource languages, the availability of such models remains limited for European Portuguese” as the authors of GlórIA project, Ricardo Lopes, João Magalhães, David Semedo, researchers at the NOVA School of Science and Technology, explain in their article GlórIA – A Generative and Open Large Language Model for Portuguese.

The model used 35 million tokens, or expressions that machines can process, from various sources.

Arquivo.pt contributed a collection of 1.4M European Portuguese archived news and periodicals.

You can try generating text in European Portuguese using the GlórIA API inference on the Hugging Face Model card.

If you want to develop a project or study using Arquivo.pt, you can start your research and, if you need help, contact us.

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Arquivo.pt in the top 3 of government services in Portugal

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Arquivo.pt, Portugal’s national web preservation service, has earned a prominent position by being named one of the top 3 government services in the 2023 Portugal Digital Awards. This recognition is testimony to the crucial role played by Arquivo.pt in the preservation and accessibility of Portugal’s digital heritage.

The three finalists in the category Best Government Project (best digital transformation project in the public administration sector) were Arquivo.pt, the Porto Digital Association and Banco de Portugal, which received the winning award.

Mission and recognition

Arquivo.pt, developed by the FCCN – National Scientific Computing , stands out as an innovative initiative in the field of digital preservation. Its mission is to collect and archive web content, allowing users to access past versions of web pages, documents and other online resources.

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The recognition at the Portugal Digital Awards highlights not only the importance of digital preservation, but also the effectiveness and relevance of Arquivo.pt as a government service. By providing a journey through time via the Internet, this resource becomes a valuable tool for researchers, academics and the general public.

Commitment to digital preservation

Participation in the award underlines Arquivo.pt’s commitment to improving the historical record of the evolution of the Web in Portugal. This service not only contributes to the country’s digital memory, but also facilitates research, promoting understanding of digital evolution over time.

In addition, Arquivo.pt’s distinction reflects FCCN’s ongoing effort to develop and improve innovative services that benefit society. Digital preservation is a crucial component in ensuring that Portugal’s digital heritage is passed on to future generations, and Arquivo.pt fulfills this role in a unique way.

In conclusion, recognition in the Portugal Digital Awards 2023, a competition that received over 300 candidate services, solidifies Arquivo.pt’s position as one of the leading government services at the forefront of digital preservation. This achievement highlights the growing importance of digital preservation in the digital age in which we live.

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Arquivo.pt reaches 1 PetaByte of preserved information!

The collection of 1 PetaByte of content predominantly in Portuguese, accessible to both researchers and ordinary citizens, is a milestone that deserves to be celebrated, in the month of its 16th anniversary.

At Arquivo.pt you can search for information published on the Web in the past, such as:

Discover more pages through the selected pages in the Arquivo.pt Online Exhibitions.

The first European page
News from The New York Times in 2008
European Film Awards 2014

Purpose and mission of the Portuguese Web Archive

Arquivo.pt was created on November 8, 2007 with the aim of preserving content from the Portuguese Web.

In 2013, as a service operated by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), its mission was formulated as follows: “To promote the preservation of content available on the national Internet, ensuring that it is made available to the scientific community and the general public” (Decreto-Lei no. 55/2013).

In recent years, Arquivo.pt has created new services, such as CitationSaver, which allows researchers to record references to web content in their scientific articles, Memorial and Complete page, which facilitate access to content scattered throughout the huge 1 PetaByte block of data.

Where did so much information come from?

In order to reach the 1 PetaByte volume, Arquivo.pt periodically recorded content from websites in the .PT domain and from Portuguese websites in other domains.

In addition, frequent daily and monthly collections were made from a small number of government sites and the main news sites in Portugal.

As part of international collaborations, content was collected from sites in various languages, for example on the 2019 European Elections.

Content prior to 2008 came from the Internet Archive and donations, such as a collection made by the National Library and INESC on the 2005 Legislative Elections.

The largest Portuguese-language dataset available to researchers

By making 1 PetaByte of information available, in open access and through the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), Arquivo.pt is a useful tool for research.

For example, a researcher who wants to do a study on elections in Portugal can use the entire Arquivo.pt collection. Better still, they can focus on just a few special collections dedicated to the elections, choosing the ones that interest them and downloading just a few Terabytes to process automatically with the APIs.

Contributions from the various teams and friends of Arquivo.pt

The development of Arquivo.pt is more than a technological issue and has been due to the dedication and persistence of the various teams that have worked on it since 2007.

It was also due to the contribution of many friends of Arquivo.pt, who were always on hand to help improve, and to the response of the user community.

Congratulations to all! Thank you.

Arquivo404 more powerful!

Arquivo.pt has been launching innovative complementary services useful for organizations to optimize their functioning.

The new release of Arquivo.pt named Helios was launched on November 13, 2023 and includes developments in Arquivo404 and CitationSaver.

Arquivo404 with new methods for defining time intervals

Arquivo404 is a service that presents website users with links to web-archived versions, instead of laconic “Page not found” error messages.

However, sometimes it is necessary to specify the correct version of a web-archived page to be displayed. For example, a website’s domain may have belonged to another entity in the past, and only web-archived versions since the website came under its current owners should to be displayed.

For this purpose, 3 new methods for configuring Arquivo404 were released :

  • setMinimumDate( minDate : Date ) – specifies the earliest date of the web-archived version of the URL that can be displayed.
  • setMaximumDate( maxDate : Date ) – specifies the latest date of the web-archived version of the URL that can be displayed.
  • setMostRelevantMemento( criterion : ‘oldest’ | ‘most-recent’ ) – specifies the order of results for the versions retrieved from the web archive. By default, the oldest version is displayed ( ‘oldest’ ).

In short, Arquivo404 now allows you to define whether to display the oldest or most recent web-archived page to the users, within a certain time interval.

CitationSaver processes HTML documents

CitationSaver is a service that extracts citations in documents to online resources and archives them. This service is particularly useful for maintaining the integrity of scientific articles and the reproducibility of the experiments and studies described in them.

Many open-access articles are published in hypertext format (HMTL). CitationSaver now processes documents in HTML format, in addition to PDF and TXT formats.

For example, if a user finds an article on the Web  which contains citations to online resources, he/she simply needs to submit the URL of the article into CitationSaver. The URLs cited in the article will be extracted and their content will be web-archived for later access.

Example of an article from the Journal of Integrated Coastal Management, available on SciELO

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Give us feedback about our services and if you detect any issue, please contact us.

World Digital Preservation Day dedicated to Justice

Last updated on November 13th, 2023 at 08:59 am

The Instituto de Gestão Financeira e Equipamentos da Justiça (IGFEJ) and Secretaria Geral do Ministério da Justiça (SGMJ), in collaboration with BAD, organized the event “Digital Preservation in Justice” to mark World Digital Preservation Day on November 2, 2023.

The event, which took place in the auditorium of the Polícia Judiciária in Lisbon, was attended by representatives from the government’s justice department and professionals from the archives, communications and IT departments.

How to use Arquivo.pt to preserve institutional websites

Arquivo.pt took part in the presentation “Preserve your website”, which addressed the issue of preserving institutional websites and critical aspects such as cybersecurity.

Justice entities can benefit from Arquivo.pt and its various services to ensure good preservation of their websites, mitigate cybersecurity threats and provide historical content to citizens.

The presentation concluded with the following recommendations:

  • Inventory and publicize your current and historical websites
  • Use Arquivo.pt services collaboratively
  • Save content in a standardized format with ArchiveWeb.page

Resources

Prepare a work for the Arquivo.pt Award 2024!

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Last updated on March 4th, 2024 at 10:46 am

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Until May 6, 2024, Arquivo.pt is launching the challenge of creating a work based on  historical information preserved from the Web.

In this 7th edition of the Arquivo.pt Award, €15,000 will be awarded to the 3 best works (€10,000 for 1st place), plus 3 honorable mentions.

Know more at: arquivo.pt/award

Honorable mentions for authors and professors

To promote the use of the Arquivo.pt in the context of teaching, research or professional usage, three partners institutions promoted honorable mentions with an associated prize.

  • The Público newspaper will award an Honorable Mention to works based on the Público online content preserved by Arquivo.pt.
  • The Aveiro Media Competence Center (AMCC) will award an Honorable Mention to the best work on the web archive of one or more Portuguese online media.
  • Association DNS.PT will award an Honorable Mention to a professor or teacher who has encouraged the submission of works.

Share and spread the word!

Help us spreading the word about the Arquivo.pt Award 2024 among potential candidates!

University of Lisbon preserved over 100 historical websites in the Arquivo.pt Memorial

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Last updated on March 27th, 2024 at 11:17 am

More than 100 historical websites from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL) are now accessible through the Memorial service of Arquivo.pt.

FCUL’s IT Department sent to Arquivo.pt a list of old websites hosted on its servers that were no longer updated, but whose historical content continues to be interesting to the community (e.g. websites of research projects or scientific events).

Arquivo.pt preserved these websites in collaboration with their ownersa, seeking to maintain a faithful representation of the published content for the future.

FCUL redirected the domain of each website to Arquivo.pt, and then, became able to disconnect the respective servers and  begin sparing the resources spent on their maintenance (e.g. electricity, data center space, human resources).

The show case of MiNEMA

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Landing page of www.minema.di.fc.ul.pt at Memorial do Arquivo.pt.

The MiNEMA scientific program website was the first that FCUL integrated into the Memorial. This website stopped being updated in 2009 when the project ended. FCUL invested resources in maintaining the website for another 10 years until it became necessary to suspend it down for cybersecurity reasons.

The Memorial of Arquivo.pt emerged as an option and since 2020, FCUL just needs to maintain the domain www.minema.di.fc.ul.pt while Arquivo.pt preserveS the information contained on the website.

Please note that the website’s content continues to be displayed in search engine results.

Follow FCUL and preserve your historical websites in the Memorial!

An increasing number of institutions are recurring to the Memorial of Arquivo.pt to safely preserve the content of their historical websites. For example, FCUL preserved 116 websites, the Government IT Network Management Center preserved 23 and the Foundation for Science and Technology preserved 40.

Public institutions have priority to benefit from this service. However, other entities can also request it as long as they own the website domain.

Identify your historical websites candidate to be integrated into the Memorial of Arquivo.pt and contact us!

To know more

Completing webpages from the past: it is possible!

Last updated on October 16th, 2023 at 06:59 pm

Some web-archived pages are reproduced incompletely due to problems occurred during the archiving process (e.g. deformatted or missing embedded images).

Complete page is a function of Arquivo.pt that allows to recover missing elements in web-archived pages, from other web archives or the original websites.

When a user views a page archived in Arquivo.pt, just needs to access the Options menu in the top right corner and choose Complete page.

This process is performed automatically.

How does Complete page work?

If you open a web-archived page that appears incomplete, try the Complete page option and wait.

Arquivo.pt will search for missing elements on the Internet and in other web archives using the Memento protocol. If it succeeds, the obtained elements will be immediately displayed on the web-archived page.

Later, these recovered elements are integrated into the Arquivo.pt collection, so that the web-archived page will appear more complete in the future accesses performed by any user.

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Completing the home page of artist Cristina Guerra’s website found a missing image.

For example, the website of artist Cristina Guerra archived in 2005 had a missing image. By using Complete page, it was possible in 2021 to obtain this missing image from another web archive which preserved it.

Participate in collaborative curation to improve the quality of Arquivo.pt!

Due to the high number of web-archived pages, it is not possible for Arquivo.pt to complete them all automatically. Therefore, the collaboration of users to identify important pages with missing elements and try to complete them is important.

By using Complete page, the users are contributing to improve the quality of the historical webpages preserved in Arquivo.pt!

Always give it a try to complete web-archived pages may that look incomplete. If you detect any problem, contact us.

Spread the word about the Arquivo.pt Complete page!

Meet the winners of the Arquivo.pt Award 2023!

Last updated on September 4th, 2023 at 02:40 pm

The winners of the Arquivo.pt Award 2023 were announced by the Público newspaper, the official communication partner of this edition, on 26 June.

40 applications were received.

The award ceremony tooke place during the closing session of the Encontro Ciência (Portuguese Science Summit), on July 7, at Aveiro University.

1st place – “Viajar no tempo sobre carris”

The winner of the 10 000 euro prize was the work “Viajar no tempo sobre carris” (Travelling through time on rails) developed by Antero Pires, Carlos Cipriano, Diogo Ferreira Nunes and Ruben Martins.

Viajar no tempo sobre carris” is an online platform that analyses and presents the evolution of train travel times in Portugal, based on timetables preserved in Arquivo.pt.

For example, it allows you to see the duration of the journey Lisbon-Oporto on the Alfa Pendular since the year 2000.

2nd place – “Representatividade das mulheres artistas na imprensa nacional”

The 2nd prize of 3 000 euros was awarded to the work “Representatividade das mulheres artistas na imprensa nacional” (Representativeness of women artists in the national press), by Cláudia Sevivas and Miguel Boavida.

This work resulted in the website Existo that provides information on Portuguese artists, referring to the web pages in which they were mentioned over time. The work is based on an analysis of their representation and visibility that allows several readings.

For example, we can find information about the artist Joana Vasconcelos, news about other artists in a certain year or even get a graphic visualization of women artists compared to men.

3rd place – “Memória Política

The 3rd prize of 2 000 euros was awarded to the work “Memória Política”, (Political Memory) developed by Miguel Lopes, Maria Carneiro and João Andrade.

“Memória Política” is a Web application that processes and presents information taken from the web pages of political parties represented in the Portuguese Parliament, archived by Arquivo.pt.

For example, it allows you to search for the term “democracy” and obtain pages from the websites of the Parties related to the search. The results can be grouped by Party and by year.

Honorable Mention granted by Público newspaper

The Público newspaper, official partner of the 6th edition of the Arquivo.pt Prize, awarded an Honourable Mention to the work “Fábrica do Jornal” (Newspaper factory), carried out by Miguel Almeida.

“Fábrica do Jornal” is a Web application that allows the user to generate a personalized newspaper from the news preserved at Arquivo.pt. The user can obtain a version that can be printed or saved in digital format.

Honorable Mention granted by Público newspaper AMCC – Aveiro Media Competence Center

The Aveiro Media Competence Center (AMCC), awarded its Honourable Mention to the work “Imaginarium”, carried out by Diogo Sousa.

Imaginarium” is a web application that searches for images based on similarities with other images.

For example, after suggesting an image of a car, “Imaginarium” searches for images in Arquivo.pt that have some affinity with the suggested image.

Flash interview – AMCC Executive Director

Award cerimony

The awards ceremony took place at the closing session of the Science 2023 Meeting, at the University of Aveiro, on 7 July 2023.

The awards were presented by the Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Elvira Fortunato, the President of the FCT Board of Directors, Madalena Alves and the Executive Director of the Aveiro Media Competence Centre, João Moraes Palmeiro.

Image gallery

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Flash enterviews

Video of the cerimony

Dissemination materials

Press

Short link to this page: arquivo.pt/winners2023

Arquivo.pt presentations at IIPC GA/WAC, RESAW 2023 and CLEOPATRA

Last updated on March 10th, 2024 at 05:23 pm

Meeting the Web Archive Community

The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), a consortium that brings together Web preservation initiatives from around the world, held its General Assembly with its members on May 10, 2023.

On the following days, May 11 and 12, the IIPC Web Archiving Conference (IIPC WAC) was held, an initiative open to the community, where people or entities not associated with the IIPC and interested in the Web preservation domain can participate.

The two events were jointly hosted by KB – National Library of the Netherlands, and by Beeld & Geluid – Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision.

Contributions from the Arquivo.pt at the Web Archiving Conference

Arquivo.pt participated in the IIPC working group meetings (Training Working Group and Curators Working Group) and contributed with presentations in the thematic sessions Collaborations & Outreach and Program infrastructure (sessions 7 and 17).

  • Arquivo.pt updates 2023 (slides)
  • Linking web archiving with arts and humanities: the collaboration between ROSSIO and Arquivo.pt (video, slides)
  • Arquivo.pt behind the curtains (slides)

Meeting the RESAW research community

RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) is an initiative created in 2012 with the aim of promoting studies based on archived Web content, in areas such as Social Sciences, Digital Arts and Humanities.

The RESAW 2023 conference was held at the MUCEM Lab (Mediterranean Institute of Heritage Crafts) in Marseille on June 5-6, 2023, under the theme Exploring the Archived Web During a Highly Transformative Age.

Contributions from Arquivo.pt to RESAW 2023

Arquivo.pt contributed with presentations to the sessions Web Archive in Mediterranean area and its merge (4.A), From online Tools to Web Archive (6.B.), Towards a participatory approach to collections (9. A.), Digging up the materials for writing web history (9.B.).

  • How to research governmental web data? (abstract, slides)
  • Archiving Cryptocurrencies (abstract, slides)
  • Time to explore, time to learn from the archived web: Arquivo.pt training initiative (abstract, slides)
  • Exhibiting Web Memories from Arquivo.pt: a call for community participation (abstract, slides)

CLEOPATRA Project Meeting

The CLEOPATRA Project, led by the L3S Research Center at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hannover, has developed since 2019 a training programme for doctoral researchers (Early Stage Researcher, PhD).

Arquivo.pt has participated in three courses: Incentives design for hybrid multilingual information processing and analytics, in Southampton; National and transnational media coverage of European parliamentary elections, 2004-2014, London; and NLP for under-resourced languages, in Zagreb, Croatia.

In 2022, the Arquivo.pt welcomed two researchers in its facilities who used the archived resources and received special support from the Arquivo.pt team to develop their research.

The CLEOPATRA Project ended in 2023 with a meeting on the 16th May, in Hannover, which brought together Professors, Researchers and representatives of the institutions involved.

Daniel Gomes, Arquivo.pt’s Manager, highlighted the new tools that Arquivo.pt makes available and the results of the work carried out by the researchers that have passed through Arquivo.pt.