Web science: Sir Tim plugs new subject

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