From the World Wide Web to Web Science

Athens.
Tonight I'm at the opening session for WebSci '09, and we're looking forward to a keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, on the twentieth anniversary of his invention of the World Wide Web. The conference itself is going to be opened in the presence of none other than the president of Greece, though, so the place is swarming with Greek police (unsurprisingly, given the continuing low-level unrest in the country). In fact, there's a couple of secret service agents coming through right now, earpiece and all. His Excellency himself is running fashionably late.

The dignitaries speak Greek, of course, so I'll skip right ahead to the welcome by Dame Wendy Hall, who leads the Web Science Research Initiative. WSRI aims to understand how the Web is used and evolved, and to develop research methodologies for doing so as well as develop future Web technologies to support such evolution. This requires a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, of course.

Finally, then, to the keynote by Tim Berners-Lee. He begins by looking back to his invention of the World Wide Web: it was born out of the frustration of being unable to share information effectively - initially at CERN, the European particle physics research project. This called for the development of a better, more inclusive information system that enabled the effective interlinkage of information - and finally, on the basis of his initial March 1989 memo Tim built the first Web browser during 1990, and gradually, the idea spread. Eventually, Web growth became exponential, and required the development of a managing body - the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Tim notes that the most important aspect of the Web is its universality - any attempt to divide it into high and low quality documents, into information from different domains, or along any other arbitrary line ultimately breaks the Web. Today, this still holds - the Web is a universal information platform which is used for just about any type of information. The W3C has an important role to play in this, of course, as it manages Web standards and ensures that using fundamental Web technologies does not require payment of royalties, to Tim or anyone else.

The Web now has some 10¹¹ individual pages, and has emerged without any overall planning; it is not disorganised, but its organisation is emergent and changeable, indeed perhaps unpredictable. And each connection between two pages indicates the interest taken in the target page by the creator of the link - so hyperlinks represent human behaviour and human interests. Further, Web development happens on a macro scale - unlike design, which works at a micro level through cycles of prototyping, testing, and improvement, for the Web it is very difficult to observe usage processes at a macro scale. Studying the Web is more similar to the study of macroeconomics, therefore.

And so we arrive at the need for Web Science - not least also because the development of the Web continues, and probably still continues to accelerate; and each evolutionary layer being added forms the basis for the next. In fact, the Web itself builds on the underlying technology of the Internet, of course, which itself in part builds on existing telephone systems, and so on. What of the new technologies emerging on the Web today, then? What will their future be? How can we forecast such developments? Some such areas include mobile access to the Web, and the availability of what Tim calls 'linked open data' (not just information) on the Web - which allows for data mashups that may in time provide us with important new knowledge.

But we need more than Web science: 80 percent of people in the world do not use the Web - and even if they manage to get access (most likely through mobile phones), the material that becomes available to them may not be culturally appropriate or accessible to them. Tim therefore plans the establishment of a World Wide Web Foundation, a foundation for the virtual world, as he calls it, which drives the development of Web technologies and Web accessibility especially in developing and as yet poorly connected countries. The Foundation would act as an advocate for the needs of such disadvantaged communities especially as new technologies are developed.

Technorati : Tim Berners-Lee, Web, Web Science, WebSci '09
Del.icio.us : Tim Berners-Lee, Web, Web Science, WebSci '09