ACM TechNews

Berners-Lee and Friends Promote Web Science Study

silicon.com (07/14/08) Ferguson, Tim

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Southampton University in the United Kingdom say their plan for creating a Web science discipline is gaining momentum, and they are now looking for corporate involvement. The group of leading academics announced the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) at MIT in November 2006, and the response has been positive because the industry recognizes the magnitude of the Web. "It's now so big... that we need methods to understand it and as you understand it you might think of ways of improving it," says professor Nigel Shadbolt, co-director of WSRI. The institute plans to coordinate an examination of the economic, social, and political aspects of the Web to better understand its development and why people use it. "[Students] need to be taught something about techniques for looking at structures, tracking data through complex networks, how to understand the basic economics and social psychology of interaction so they've got some appreciation of how the Web phenomena work on the whole," Shadbolt says. WSRI will address the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and other Web phenomena, and the future of linked data, the semantic Web, and other concepts.

http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39258586,00.htm

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