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A field of its own

MIT’s Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, talks about why we need a new discipline to study it.

Eric Smalley

Seventeen years after inventing the protocols that form the backbone of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee remains at the forefront of developing next-generation Web technologies through his work as director of the World Wide Web Consortium.

These days, Berners-Lee, a senior researcher at MIT, is thinking about how to train the next generation of scientists and technologists to study the Web and its enormous impact on society. To that end, he’s teamed up with the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, where he’s a professor, to launch the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), which will promote Web science as a new interdisciplinary field of study. The project includes joint research projects, a fellows program, and workshops.

Berners-Lee discussed his project with Nature Network Boston.

Why create a science dedicated to the study of the Web?

Because the Web is big and complicated, and therefore it takes a lot to understand it. The computer is just one part of the Web. If computer science is cell biology, then Web science is the study of the human body. There’s a huge relationship between them, of course.

Why do it now?

The Web is becoming important. Society is starting to depend on the Web. But the concentration [of new developments on the Web] has been mostly on what’s possible with the current technology. There’s been a lack of emphasis on research into new phenomena and interesting new aspects of the Web.

We’d like to ask some much more far-reaching questions about how it could fundamentally change if we look much further ahead.

You’ve been working for a while on what you call the Semantic Web—which would link data on the Web more intelligently. How is the Web Science Research Initiative different?

WSRI isn’t going to be dealing with the rollout of the Semantic Web. It is going to be looking at the longer term and the larger scale, looking at what happens when you do have a lot of data.

What are some examples of the kinds of problems future Web scientists will be tackling?

Suppose we look ahead a few years. There is a large number of repositories of public data such as chemicals data and nutritional data, but also corporate data about products and compatibility of parts, and personal data linking people and publications, and information about what publications people want about which chemicals and which parts, and so on.

We have a Web of data…different repositories of information about different things. The question is, if I ask a computer an arbitrary question about the way these things are all connected, how do you figure out where the data resources are to answer it?

There’s another very common problem which you see across the Web. It’s a human problem of how to come to common decisions. How do we find a consensus? We have social communities forming all over the Web. These social communities have to govern themselves. They have to decide what they value and what they don’t.

Our challenge is to invent new systems [that allow these communities to govern themselves], which may be able to do much better, be much fairer and more efficient than any systems we have to date.

There are privacy, security, social, and legal issues that surround the use of the Web. What will Web scientists bring to the picture?

Web science is about the study of this interconnected mass of people. When you look at a phenomenon such as, for example, a rumor spreading, you have to take into account the technology—blogging technology, for example—to look at the motivations, the psychology of the individual passing a rumor on.

You may look at economic incentives…if the rumor has been deliberately generated to drive a stock price up. You may look at laws which constrain who’s allowed to start rumors under what circumstances.

You have to take into account all those things which affect how individuals react to find out whether the rumor flops or not. Web science is the study of this sort of phenomenon, and it needs to bring together all these disciplines.

What advice would you give a student who is interested in a career in Web Science?

I’d point out that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

There’s a temptation for people to look at the Web as a fait accompli. Whereas in fact, because of the power of computers and because of the powerful emergent phenomena that happen when you put very large numbers of things together, we’re really only seeing the beginning of what can emerge on the Web.

So, to a student I would say, really, your imagination is the only limit to what you can do in this field.

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