Web Science as a Field of Study
As Computer Science is slowly being accepted as real science, New York Times reports that The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain are planning to announce a joint research program in Web science. The program will be led by the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee.
Tim Berners-Lee says:
It?s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn?t tell you about what happens on the Web.
Probably using this perspective, researchers point out that Web science has both social and engineering dimensions. The social dimension includes the social networks aspect of today’s web. Researchers also point out that the web science shifts the focus of computer science from how a single computer works to how a decentralized web system works.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is positive about Web science as he says:
This kind of research is likely to have a lot of influence on the next generation of researchers, scientists and, most importantly, the next generation of entrepreneurs who will build new companies from this.
The NY Times article also points out the intersection of Web science with the so-called “services science”. Services science is described as a study to figure out how computing can be used in other fields like economy. This type of research is backed up by I.B.M., Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.
One possible research area of Web science is highlighted as privacy in the article. I think it is a good example because in today’s web it is not enough to deal with privacy in the technical sense of restricting access to databases with sensitive information. The emergence and increasing popularity of social networks encourage users to share personal information which may not seem sensitive at the time. It is definitely important to understand the social aspect of the web as it stands today and to put some social aspect to the mere algorithmic side of computer science.
[tags]technology, web, web science, computer science [/tags]