The WebKurator.de Platform: Combined Regional and Topical Web Curation
type: InProceedings
abstract: The systematic curation of the Web remains a central challenge for national libraries and memory institutions that aim to preserve culturally and regionally relevant content. Existing directory-based approaches such as Curlie implement a predominantly topic-centric, one-dimensional hierarchy, where geographic aspects are intertwined with topical and linguistic categories. To address this limitation, we present WebKurator.de, a collaborative platform for combined regional and topical web curation, initially focused on the German web. WebKurator introduces a two-dimensional curation model that explicitly separates topical categorization and geographic annotation. The system integrates LLM–based topic classification and imprint-based address extraction with geocoding, and supports user suggestions together with moderated review. The platform is bootstrapped from the German Imprints Dataset, a large-scale collection of 5.54 million websites. Among them, 3.14 million contain imprint pages, for which we successfully extracted and geocoded postal addresses. Of these, 2.58 million (85.17%) are located in Germany and also have an assigned topic label. These websites form the initial foundation of WebKurator.de and can be continuously extended through user suggestions.
creator:
  item: Michael Dinzinger
  item: NatanaelArndt
  item: Ben Böck
  item: Jelena Mitrović
  item: Michael Granitzer
has format: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3795513.3807433
is part of: 2026-WebSci-Companion
issued: 2026-05-25
doi: 10.1145/3795513.3807433