Tag: Web Science

Web Science seeks to investigate, analyze, and intervene in the Web from a sociotechnical perspective, integrating our understanding of the mathematical properties, engineering principles, and the social processes that shape its past, present, and future. Over the past 10 years, Web Science has made remarkable progress, providing the building blocks to face the challenges described here. And yet there is more do to.

Web Science in Europe begins from the premise that the Web is both technical and social. From this perspective, it is so difficult to disentangle the social from the technical that we describe the Web as ‘sociotechnical.’ The Web has been built on layers of communication at different levels of abstraction, from physical link layers (such as Ethernet) over Internet and transport layers (such as TCP/IP). It started as a Web of Documents (HTML), which served as the nucleus that other Webs would piggyback on: a Web of Data (RDF, SPARQL), a Web of Services (REST, JSON), a Web of Things.

All these layers are defined by underlying technical standards and are the result of sophisticated engineering. And they are also deeply social, in two key ways. First, they have been developed in particular social contexts, with social goals in mind. … Second, the Web merely offered a set of opportunities for humans to develop and populate information constructs and link with each other.
—CACM, “Web Science in Europe: Beyond Boundaries“

Articles / Computing & Technology

Web Science in Europe: Beyond Boundaries

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Steffen Staab, Susan Halford, Wendy Hall

“For the past decade, Web Science has been building the interdisciplinary expertise to face the challenges and realize the value of this rapidly growing and diversifying Web. This task transcends the work of any single academic discipline. While our universities continue—overwhelmingly—to be organized in siloes established in the 20th century, or much earlier, the Web demands expertise from computer science, sociology, business, mathematics, law, economics, politics, psychology engineering, geography, and more. Web Science exists to integrate knowledge and expertise from across fields, integrating this into systematic, robust, and reliable research that provides an action base for the future of the Web.”