Web Science : Protecting the World Wide Web from …

Here are two interesting and related articles from Guardian

Here are some excerpts to give you an idea as to what it is about -

Sir Tim Berners-Lee — the British computer scientist who came up with the idea of the web 19 years ago — said it was vital that scientists and engineers worked harder to understand how the web works, in order to keep it evolving.

His comments came at an event to promote the new academic discipline of web science — a study of the web and the way it works.

The Web Science Research Initiative, which is being championed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, aims to encourage new technologies and systems on top of the web.

Although many of the future directions the web could go in remain unknown, one idea already approaching fruition is the semantic web — a system to make the web more intelligent — which Sir Tim has been working on for several years.

Why are you advocating the study of ‘web science’?
There are lots of people currently in different disciplines who are looking at the web, and they’re realising that it’s big and its complex. There are arguably more web pages out there than neurons in the brain. And while the web is growing, the brain is getting smaller.

The web is big, it’s complex, we don’t understand it — but we do depend upon it. Business depends on the web working, democracy depends on the web working … people finding out what sort of flu their kid has gone down with depends on the web working.

You’ve been working on the Semantic Web. Will this help the idea grow, or will it be superceded?
The Semantic Web is one of these things; it’s locked into exponential growth. But it’s just one area. There are other areas we can spot that at the moment: the effect of the web going onto mobile devices, we can wonder whether that’s going to bring the web more into developing countries — will that actually reduce the gap, or will it widen the gap? Will we end up with information providers or consumers being separated even more?

There are lots of things you can see from the current trends, but web science is really something that isn’t just about current trends — really we should be very careful to keep its sights set out 10 to 15 years. We don’t want to spend too much time patting ourselves on the back for what we’ve done in the last five years.