Architecture overview

Major Components

Wayback consists of four primary components, each with several current implementations that can be combined to customize installations of varying scales and capabilities.

The four components are:

• Query UI: responsible for parsing user queries, executing them against the Resource Index, and rendering the results in lists or tables for end user consumption. Hyperlinks are typically included in the results, allowing users to navigate into the Replay UI.

• Resource Store: responsible for retrieving archived content, abstracting the medium and format used to store the web content.

• Resource Index: responsible for satisfying queries against the documents located in the Resource Store, either through URL based queries, full-text search, or other novel search mechanisms.

• Replay UI: responsible for altering the context of documents being viewed by users, so hyperlink references refer back into the Wayback system, allowing users to interactively browse the web “as it was”.

Taken from Brad Tofel's ‘Wayback’ for Accessing Web Archives, presented at IWAW in 2007.