Since the World Wide Web blossomed in the mid-1990s, it has exploded to more than 15 billion pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life. Today more and more people’s jobs depend on the Web. Media, banking and health care are being revolutionized by it. And governments are even considering how to run their countries with it. Little appreciated, however, is the fact that the Web is more than the sum of its pages. Vast emergent properties have arisen that are transforming society. E-mail led to instant messaging, which has led to social networks such as Facebook. The transfer of documents led to file-sharing sites such as Napster, which have led to user-generated portals such as YouTube. And tagging content with labels is creating online communities that share everything from concert news to parenting tips.

But few investigators are studying how such emergent properties have actally happened, how we might harness them, what new phenomena may be coming or what any of this might mean for humankind. A new branch of science—Web science—aims to address such issues. The timing fits history: computers were built first, and computer science followed, which subsequently improved computing significantly. Web science was launched as a formal discipline in November 2006, when the two of us and our colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in England announced the beginning of a Web Science Research Initiative. Leading researchers from 16 of the world’s top universities have since expanded on that effort.

5 Comments

1. 1. bbk_cb 12:25 AM 9/17/08

   Honestly, the entire idea of web science seems to be something I might have read about in Wired Magazine circa 1999.
   
   While there are many divergent groups with an interest in studying the status quo of the Internet, I don't see how they form a cohesive science nor how their findings will remain relevant when the underlying technology moves on to the next great thing, leaving everyone's predictions about the future behind.

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2. 2. Tan Boon Tee 10:47 PM 9/17/08

   Excellent! Now there is a new discipline emerging to be known as Web Science, based on the multi-interdisciplinary approach.
   
   In the earlier days of Internet and www, all good things were said about IT, and it was hailed as one of the greatest invention ever. Gradually, abuses and hackers creep in, resulting in users losing their privacy and identity.
   
   To argue that Web Science could be harnessed to benefit society or used to solve the issues like securing privacy seems premature. For to every positive action, there will always be a negative reaction try hard to counter the positive effect. This is going to be a tough game. (btt1943@yahoo.com)
   

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3. 3. bbk_cb 12:14 AM 9/18/08

   By the way, PageRank is actually a non-recursive Maclaurin polynomial. I'm pretty sure that the inventors of it didn't spend more than 5 minutes thinking about the problem as a recursion; in fact, they probably started out with a large set of equations with many unknowns and decided to borrow a common approach used in physics or economics.
   
   And while it may seem like a big insight because it has had good success so far, it has major limitations. There are much more sophisticated data mining techniques out there, but they're just not within the grasp of a naive user. But what I'm afraid of is that PageRank exploits a correlation (many links = trustworthy source) without fully appreciating the causal relationship, if any. Oftentimes in these situations, exploiting such a correlation can actually make the correlation go away. I think that is what Google is slowly going to accomplish.

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4. 4. Pensabot 06:41 PM 10/10/08

   Ok. Web science is an interesting serious discipline emerging from computer engineering, popular technologies and knowledge to research with social netoworks. Our language turning dynamic process itself by semantics and internaut interactions like a brain. Neuroscience will be a main part of this web science frame-researches.
   
   Pensabot.

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5. 5. vesper 02:41 PM 10/21/09

   From my understanding Web Science is mostly about pathfinding, building frameworks, and combining knowledge. You mentioned the next big thing.
   Sometimes this can be an evolution of an existing thing, the Web could be changed a lot if the semantic web, cloud computing, and other ideas are realised. There is nothing that points to Web tailing off or slowing down anytime soon, and if going by other examples of communication such as radio, tv, or telephone, there will be several iterations spanning several decades
   
   Also think that in the past computer science was within maths, and then when it branched off it subdivided. Without branching off of other disciplines such as Web science, it could take a longer time to get where we are going as there wouldnt be focused discussion or concentrateresearch effort about the Web.

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