Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web

Hendler, Shadbolt, Hall, Berners-Lee, Weitzner

web www analysis emergent systems behavior social trust semantic

@article{hendler:cacm2008,
  title="Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to
         Understanding the Web",
  author="James Hendler and Nigel Shadbolt and Wendy Hall and
          Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Weitzner",
  journal="Communications of the ACM",
  volume="51",
  number="7",
  month="July",
  year="2008",
  pages="60--69"
}

Tools and methodology for studying and understanding the World Wide Web as an entity are seriously lacking

• It's growing and changing so fast that no one person can really comprehend all of it at any point
• It's by far the biggest construct ever created, and has probably had the biggest impact on human communication in all of history
• But, we don't really have a science by which to understand it, or to design for it.

Far too much web design is done by trial and error, hit or miss

• Need to understand the underlying emergent behaviors and how to engineer them in order to better construct successful social applications