[LIS-Forum] News on Web science

[ryerna at iitk.ac.in]

Dear Frineds, kindly share the following information

http://ia.rediff.com/money/2006/nov/03web.htm?q=tp&file=.htm

        Or Text version

        Now 'Web science' to help improve the Internet




Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the British scientist who invented the World Wide
Web, wants to turn the Internet into a science: Web science.
In keeping with this, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
University of Southampton on Thursday announced the launch of the Web
Science Research Initiative, a panel that will understand the scientific,
technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the Internet
reported news.com

The WSRI will have its headquarters at the Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and at the School of Electronics and
Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

The two collaborating universities will raise funds from the corporate
world and set up a research centre 'that will sponsor Ph.D. students and
ultimately create undergraduate curricula in Web science,' news.com
reported.

In a recent article, Berners-Lee had said that the Web has changed the
ways people communicate, collaborate, and educate. But with the Net
evolving rapidly, it is necessary to understand its potential impact in
the future too.

He said that since humans are the creators of Web pages and links between
them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a
macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by
social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently
interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web
and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial
patterns to occur.

The WSRI will have four directors: Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World
Wide Web Consortium; Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at
University of Southampton; Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial
intelligence at the University of Southampton; and Daniel J. Weitzner,
principal research scientist at MIT.

The father of the World Wide Web said that the social aspect of the Web
demands that a field separate from computer science be explored. The WSRI
members say that these social scientists and life sciences gurus can help
study online communities and help 'Web scientists' understand how the Web
operates and how it can be more responsive to the existing relationships
people actually have online.

The initiative will lead to better understanding of the Internet and will
help improve the way people communicate, learn and work on the Internet.

"We really must have a science of understanding this. We must be able to
look at whether it's going to continue to serve us well, or whether we'll
end up with some things which suddenly appear overnight and which in fact
are very bad," Berners-Lee said in an interview with BBC.