“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers. 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.”
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Tim Berners-Lee
Sounds Interesting...isn't it?
Every Sunday morning, the Hong Kong University airs some academic lectures through cable channels for distance education purposes. As luck would have it, I just happened to be browsing through the channels at the right moment to catch Professor Bebo White (Stanford University) explain a lesson on why do we need a separate science for the web and what actually constitutes this science.
And it made good sense...the Internet / Web is no longer about just Technology/some protocols. As the largest human construct in history, the web now involves intersection of multiple traditional disciplines of science. The Web is now used for a variety of purposes such as commerce, banking, social interaction, government, research collaboration and many more domains. Essentially, it has now become an alternate platform for people interaction and activity. If you compare this understanding with the above quote from Sir Tim Berners-Lee then, it becomes very clear that the Web mandates a new science of its own. Here's a representation for the interdisciplinary nature of Web Science (reference):
But how do we define Web Science as a ‘Science’ - What exactly constitutes a science? In the traditional sense, anything which can be described with the use of natural laws and algorithms falls under the classification of a science for example, electrical science which is essentially described by Maxwell's laws of electricity. On the other hand, computer science is essentially a synthetic science where the laws are developed/derived in order to facilitate the desired behavior; in other words, the engineering aspect drives the rules/framework.
Web science is an amalgamation of both - it needs both Engineering and Study; engineering at the micro-level to define the protocols/languages which drive the web platform and at the same time, study of the various web interactions/communications to understand the desirable / undesirable aspects of the web.
The Study aspect of Web science leads to developing a better understanding of the Web Architecture or its topology. Is it just a random network of inter-connected links or is there a formal structure to it. On an interaction level, how the Web is used by user communities and what are the associated governance, security and privacy issues. The Engineering aspect allows us to develop better methods for effective data retrieval for example, we get specific answers to our search queries rather than hundreds of links with partial relevance to the search query.
Given this background, the real purpose of the Web Science is tracking the Web’s development, determining which innovations are good (e.g. P2P) and which bad (e.g. phishing), and contributing to the beneficial developments.
Drawing from Dr. White's discussion papers, the goals of the web science are:
- To understand what the Web is
- To engineer the future of the Web and
- To ensure the Web's social benefit
With the exponential increase in the volume of web content and its varied applications, it is but logical to have a dedicated science which studies the underlying basic principles, the infrastructure/topology, the associated processes and thereby, define better ways of exploiting the available information.
References
No comments:
Post a Comment