Tim Berners-Lee Announces Web Science Initiative - Studying the Social Web
This morning I participated in a conference call by MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain, announcing an initiative called Web Science. Tim Berners-Lee is leading the program, which is essentially about formalizing a new kind of scientific discipline called Web Science. The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web and how people are using it. But as well as studying the Web, they also hope to shape the future of the Web.
Web science will have both social and engineering dimensions. As the NY Times reported, it will include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. For example trust and privacy are two specific areas that can be studied more. Also Web Science will look at more technical areas, such as how huge decentralized Web systems work. In the conference call, it was made clear that researching the economic consequences of the Web (and "web 2" was mentioned) is part of the agenda too.
As Berners-Lee summarized it in a pre-conference interview with the BBC:
"What we're saying is that it's becoming so important that things like Wikipedia are being created, new business models are emerging and that it's changing our lives so much that we have to have a science to understand this."
In terms of how Web Science will shape the future Web, Sir Tim told the BBC that the Web is a creative medium - and so the Web has to develop new features that "express the social properties of information which specify what it is, where its from and how trustworthy it is."
Highlights from conference call
In the conference call Tim Berners-Lee started off by mentioning the 100 million Web sites milestone recently reached by the Web. He went on to say that Web Science is about understanding the macroscopic network-driven effects of the Web, which have evolved from the microscopic aspects of the Web which he created. Ultimately though, Sir Tim said that "the goal is social" and the Web is about helping humanity.
Berners-Lee spoke about how even in the field of economics, it's not just about studying the money part of the dot com era, but how things like Page Rank have influenced the system - "the way effectively the currency now flows across the links as kudos, as reputation of web sites". So with this initiative they want to bring together lots of different disciplines (computing, biology, economics, etc), as well as focusing on understanding and engineering the Web as one big system.
According to Tim, Web Science is about "building a new Web, a better Web, building things on top of the Web infrastructure" - making the Web infrastructure a space where things can happen and making that space more powerful. He spoke about how the Web started off with simple rules - e.g. http. But you can't tell the macroscopic effects of that by looking at the rules of http - "the macroscopic system is very complicated". He also mentioned building "a fractal society", which he's spoken about a lot before and I've written about in the past too.
In the Web Science initiative, Tim said they'll be "developing new ways of analyzing things and we'll be building systems which have completely new properties". But he made a point of saying that because the Web is about people, social aspects will be a very important part of it. Also the creativity aspect of the Web - Tim said at one point that "the really important thing about the Web is that it's a universal space".
Summary
I for one am very pleased that studying Web systems is now an official discipline - and who better to lead it than Tim Berners-Lee and MIT. In many ways, some of us tech bloggers have been unofficially studying the Web for quite some time, but of course you also need hard data and complex analysis as well - which is where Web Science will hopefully shine. As Tim Berners-Lee said, the Web system is huge and complicated. There's a lot we're still learning about the Web and its effects on society and business.
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This is really right on the money. The 'social/interactive web' is different than tv and radio, which aren't interactive in the same way, and accessing information interactivly means applications by default, it's actually the very definition of an application, and that, in turn, lays the foundation for the social vibe that is the 'now' experience people are looking for in any media context. Applications enhances the web, making it social, and when you access the social web, you also access it's applications.
So, any device that wants to access the web, will have to support it's applications as well, by default.
In the end, all new applications will be webbified, for this reason alone, if no other.
The web has become the new OS already.
Great idea.. Web is really a very important part of our daily life now, and even by 10 years, we'll be using web based applications and not traditional desktop applications anymore.. It is a very important economic and sociological phenomenon and deserves to be studied separately. This will help everyone.
Web is defintely changing the way people behave around the world. YouTube,MySpace,blogs are the new kind of social phneomena which have evolved in last few years because of the web. It should be interesting to study..
What a great idea! The part I'm interested in is the methodology of studying the web. What kind of tools will they use to study the social aspects of web browsing? Will they poll users, or possibly ask a sample of users to install an Alexa-like toolbar to track usage and analyze how users interact with each other?
now this is what i call validation! nice write btw...(comment sub`d via mobile)
A great Idea. I wish to add one thing more, about the importance of spatial reference for information on web. "Where is it" as important as "what is it".
In the beginning the Web was read only then blogs, wikis, Flickrs, YouTubes, and MySpaces started to sprout up everywhere, but it was all still bounded by a single site silos controled by the site publishers. These are all obviously huge trends that may dwarf the original read only web. The next step is in letting people relink pages and reauthor parts of sites--connect up things that the original authors did not foresee and doing this anywhere on any page of the Web. The Social Web must take commenting and connecting out of the hands of the site publishers and make those functions available to every Web user. Richard is already starting to participate in this idea.
While trying to assess the future of internet, I was reading a survey made in 2005 about where the internet will go in the next 10 years. To read this, you can find in the following blog posting.
http://ragusivanmalai.blogspot.com/2006/11/future-of-internet.html