By Martin LaMonica, 3 November 2006 08:50
NEWS
Representatives from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Southampton have announced a plan to establish a research centre to study the social and technological implications of growing web adoption.
The universities intend to raise money from corporations for the project, dubbed the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), to establish a research centre that will sponsor PhD students and ultimately create undergraduate curricula in web science. The multidisciplinary initiative already has financial backing from Google and IBM.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the basic software of the web and is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards group, as well as being one of this year's silicon.com Agenda Setters, said: "The web is basically a web of people. It's a way that social people interact. Because it's something we created, we have a duty to make it better."
The universities intend to combine several disciplines, including social sciences, psychology and life sciences, with technology development.
The social aspect of the web - and the internet's huge impact on society - demands that a field separate from computer science be explored, organisers said. For example, eBay is interesting because it relies on the involvement of millions of people. Similarly, Google used a mathematical algorithm that examines how millions of individuals link to other pages to improve search results.
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Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, said: "We want to throw some light on forecasting what these new technologies might lead to in the human sense, in the community sense - and in the business."
Social scientists can help analyse online communities, and experts in life sciences can help web scientists understand how complex systems like the human body - or the web - operate, she said.
Researchers would like systems that can better reflect the social relationships between people, said Daniel Weitzner, principle research scientist at Csail.
For example, finding out basic information on meeting participants, such as phone numbers or professions, from an online calendar entry would entail a lot of manual work. But socially aware web applications could make the task much easier
He said: "The web fails to capture the nature of social relationships. We want the web to be more responsive to the existing relationships people actually have."
Researchers intend to keep "lanes open" between the universities and the W3C to standardise suitable research, Berners-Lee said. The plan is to make technology available without royalties to encourage adoption, said Weitzner.
Organisers said the creation of a field of study for web science does not eliminate the need for continued research in existing fields, such as engineering and computer science. Rather, they envisioned web science as a field that straddles both the technical and social nature of the web and complements other fields.
Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com
Comments
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1. anonymous
This is incredible. There is an entire, established FIELD ALREADY studying this. It's called Management Information Systems. Its an interdisciplinary field within business schools that combines psychology, communication, computer science.
The creators of Web Science might want to actually read Information Science Research, Management Information Systems Quarterly or many of the other journals and published studies that have already been studying these issues for many years.
2. Richard Sarson
The Web is an artefact, the result of technology. Science is the study of the natural world. You cannot have a science about an artefact. So, Sir Tim's initiative is an oxymoron.
So, incidentally, are "computer science" and the "social sciences".
Your anonymous Canadian is right. Information IS something that happens in the natural world. You can therefore have a science about that. And the findings of information science could indeed be applied to the Web to enhance it as a technology.
But, to think that the Web - or computers - are a science, engenders confusion of thought.
I am sad that Sir Tim and Professor Wendy have fallen into this trap.
These are not my ideas, but those of Gordon Scarrott, a great but unsung hardware designer who died ten years ago.