Web Science: Motivation, Goals and Contributions

Chapter Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Web Science: Motivation, Goals and Contributions

Benjamin Heitmann


Benjamin Heitmann slide of 18

Introduction

Society today is dependent on the WebAffects areas besides computer

science: politics

law and economics media and the arts

very different situation 10/15 years ago

Web Science asks: Should we be studying the Web by itself?

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Outline

Motivation:

Why Web Science?

Goals and definitions:

Definitions of Web Science and intended goals

Contributions:

tangible results from Web Science

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Why is Web Science necessary?

The Web affects most areas of today’s society

Society is dependent on the Web

The Web is the substrate for our society

Computer Science is no longer enough to understand the Web

Many disciplines need to contribute to this understanding

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© Flickr user “denn”



Society on the Web: Media

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“A number of proposals have been put forward which would avoid this in whole or in part and which would, we argue, be at least as effective as Nama in laying the ground for such a banking system. These models have been well discussed through a variety of blogs on the web and in the mainstream media.”



Society on the Web (2)

Dot-Com Bubble:

Bust effects whole economy in 2000/2001

Digital Rights Management: Amazon deletes book under customers nose

Privacy: facebook apps (e.g. quizzes) steal and sell users data

Freedom of speech: Web 2.0 sites used to enable and spy on Iranian opposition

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Society on the Web (3)

Politics: Obama campaign was won with small donations (less then 100 dollars) given through Web site

Humanities and Arts:

The rise of network culture:

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“the network has become the dominant cultural logic”

“Networked Publics”, Kazys Varnelis (Editor), 2008

© Shepard Fairey (obeygiant.com)

© http://networkedbook.org

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?%5Fencoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Kazys%20Varnelis

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?%5Fencoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Kazys%20Varnelis



Defining Web Science

Different views of Web Science and its goals:

1. Systems-level view of the web

2. Study of interplay between engineering and social factors

3. Measuring the web

4. Predicting the future web5. Outline for educating the next generation

6. Encourage collaboration

7. Establishing a new scientific method

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Systems-level view of the Web

Goal: Holistic view of the web

No partitioning

No delegation of research on one area to only one discipline

Problems usually can not be solved by just one discipline

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© Web Science Research Initiative



Web Science Process Model

Goal: Study interplay between engineering and social factors.

Increase in complexity:

result is transition from micro to macro effects

Examples: first 8 years of the Web

Wikipedia

Myspace, Twitter and Facebook

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© Law

rence Lessig

Source:“Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web”, Hendler, Shadboldt, Hall, Berners-Lee, Weitzner, Communications of the ACM (2008)



Measuring the Web

Goal: gather empirical data and statistics about the Web or parts of it

Goal: create models for different properties of the Web

In and Out-degree distributionCharacterising connectivity of

pages on the webPower laws for incoming links,

e.g. to blogsGrowth: 7 million pages a day

(2005)

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Source: “Graph structure in the Web”, Broder, Kumar et al.

© C

lay Shirky



Predicting the future Web

Goal: predict why technologies are successful on the Web

Combine quantitative and qualitative statements for predictions

Next big thing after twitter: Augmented reality?

Will Linked Data take off?

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Could the Web exist without TBL inventing it?

© U

niversity of Southamptin

© Wired magazine



Web Science as Education

Goal: Develop a curriculum for teaching a combination of disciplines.

Next generation of researchers will have a unified perspective.

Other disciplines which started as interdisciplinary approaches: computer science

life sciences

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Encouraging collaboration

Goal: provide venues and incentives for researchers from different disciplines to collaborate.

It is hard to get funding for interdisciplinary research

Approaches combining more then two disciplines are rare

Current venues: annual Web Science conference

workshops, e.g. at WWW2008

WSRI Journal

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© Web Science Research Initiative, both pictures



Establishing a new scientific method

Goal: develop a new language and methodology for making statements about the Web on a systems level

language: scientists from the different disciplines must be able to communicate with each other

methodology: focus on empirical basis

take quantitative and qualitative findings into account

allow normative and extrapolating methods

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Source: Futures studies article on Wikipedia



Contributions of Web Science (1)

Quantitative measurements of the Web:e.g. “Graph structure in the Web”, Broder, Kumar et al.

Social Networking Patterns: Social Drivers for creating and sustaining communities“Theories of communication networks”, Monge, Contractor

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Source: Noshir Contractor, slides at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/sna-workshop/documents/20076NoshMaryland.pdf



Contributions of Web Science (2)

Qualitative case studies (just a selection)Philosophy: “The Devil’s Long Tail: Religious Moderation and

Extremism on the Web”, O'Hara, Stevens (2009)

applying the Long Tail theory to religious markets on the Web

Anthropology: "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace", Boyd (2007)

Initial user population shapes character of social networks, not just technical features

Web Science Process Model: “Introducing new features to Wikipedia - Case studies for Web science”, Schindler, Vrandecic (2009)

How the Wikipedia community influences the features of the Wikipedia software and vice versa

Governance: “Designing effective regulation for the Dark side of the Web”, Richter, Brown (2009)

Overview of government regulation, proposal of using NGOs for more effective regulation

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http://journal.webscience.org/181/










Addendum

Acknowledgements: My visit to the WebScience Summer school was funded by: Unit for Information Mining and Retrieval (UIMR)

Data Intensive Infrastructures Unit (UDI2)

Show of hands for collaborationOther questions?Starting points for literature:

“Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web”, Hendler, Shadboldt, Hall, Berners-Lee, Weitzner, Communications of the ACM (2008)

Web Science conference proceedings (websci09.org)

http://webscience.org/publications/

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Web Science: Motivation, Goals and Contributions

Education

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