Berners-Lee puts web science on the IT agenda

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'Web science' was the focus as the father of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, spoke today about the on-going work of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI).

Berners-Lee talked about web science in the context of his idea of the 'semantic web'. This is an evolving extension of the world wide web in which the web as a whole can be made more intelligent and even intuitive about how best to serve a user's needs.

"There are all kinds of things to be said about web science," he said. "For example there are more web pages out there than neurones in your brain."

Berners-Lee also said that there have been various discussions on what kind of academic field web science should be put into: "At Oxford, when I did physics, this kind of study was actually called 'experimental philosophy'."

Berners-Lee went on to speak about how designs of web systems like wikis, blogs and email involved social conventions, which web scientists have to take into account alongside the technological aspects of their study.

WSRI was founded in November 2006 as a joint venture between MIT and the University of Southampton. It has the aim of promoting study on the amount of data online and its relation to human behaviour and knowledge.

It also attempts to question the reliability of the data and promote best practice in how the web is used. The group is steadily growing, and alongside raising money and gaining corporate support it has offered summer schools at Oxford University, where it hopes to have social science and technological students working together.

Fellow directors at WSRI also talked about the real world applications for web science, such as patient history research for medical purposes, where understanding of the scientific, technical and social factors that drive the growth of the web would be very useful for industry and business communities.

"Many of the interesting issues that arise in a space where you are linking lots of data on a very large scale, end up being social, legal and regulatory in nature," added WSRI director Nigel Shadholt.

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