I’ve recently returned from Athens Greece where I had the privilege of co-chairing the conference “WebSci09: Society On-Line,” the first real conference in the emerging area of Web Science . The conference went quite well – we had about 350 registrants, and close to 1000 people showed up for the special opening session/reception, which included a talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, and Turing Award winner Joseph Sifakis. For the ubergeeks among us, the coolest moment was when we learned that the tag #websci09 was one of the top ten twitter labels for a little while during the meeting (and tweets on the meeting went out in seven languages and in English, Greek and Chinese character sets).
I figured that this meeting is a good chance for me to introduce myself to more of the science-blogging community here on the Nature Network, because I believe I’ll be the first blogger representing this new field of Web Science. Which, of course, leads to two things I need to do – introduce myself, and introduce Web Science. I’m a computer science professor with a long background in artificial intelligence and, more recently, the Semantic Web. (You can see lots more about me at http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler) About 4 years ago, I proposed to one of my colleagues, Wendy Hall], (who recently became “Dame Wendy” – way to go DW), that we should put together a book on the future on the Web. She suggested instead that we might consider putting together a workshop on that topic, and in September 2005, the British Computer Society was nice enough to host an invitation only workshop on the subject. We worked hard to make sure that people from many different areas were there, not just computer scientists, and it was a good meeting.One of the results of this workshop was a realization that not just society but virtually every field of science (social, physical and mathematical) was being impacted by the Web. It was changing how we published, how we communicated, how we found and kept students, how we taught, etc. However, it also became clear that there was no field of study that took the Web seriously as the primary area of study in its own right. Mathematicians, physicists and computer Scientists were studying the Web graph and other aspects of the networks of connections on the Web, social scientists were analyzing Web-based systems, like Wikipedia, and the impacts of the Web on policy and politics, and engineers (in academe and industry) were creating new Web systems left and right. However, there was no where these folks were coming together to learn about each other’s work. Further, we realized just how intertwined these things were – for example, a change to the Web’s architecture could have huge impacts on the social systems supported by the Web, whether it resulted from a desire to engineer for better scalability (say a change to the underlying Internet stack) or for social reasons (like the providers wanting more money from differential packet handling). Like the Web itself, where social, scientific, and engineering sites are linked together without respect for disciplinary and methodological boundaries, the scientists studying the Web needed to be significantly more deeply intertwined.
This idea led to a short article on ’Creating a Science of the Web":http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5788/769?ijkey=o66bodkFqpcCs&keytype=ref&siteid=sci, and thence to a longer Framework for Web Science book and various articles and workshops have followed. Sessions on Web Science have been held at the World Wide Web Conference, at various conferences in the subfields of the social, economic and computer sciences, and work now proceeds on the development of Web Science curriculum materials as several schools throughout the world are starting programs in the area at the PhD, masters, and most recently at the undergraduate levels.
It should be noted that Web Science was never really intended to be a separate or separable field, and we work hard to keep it linked – whether physicist or psychologist, Web engineer or Wikipedia analyst, legal analyst of the laws of the Web or mathematician trying to develop the laws of the Web, there’s a unifying meme, that of the Web itself, that must be respected. Web Science is the place for us to come together to understand the interactions, not to separate ourselves from the others in our fields.
And it is important to note that Web Science has some unique and exciting challenges of its own. Like a physical science, there is a real thing we study (the Web exists and can be analyzed), like a social science, there’s indirect effects on the way people live their lives (and with 21% of humanity already using the Web, that’s a heck of an impact), and like an engineering discipline, what we study is made by people, not a natural system, so it can be manipulated. Further, unlike most other systems people study, this one has the annoying property of growing so fast that by the time we can say much, it may have changed — while you were reading this blog post, billions of Internet packets were generated on the Web. Creating methodologies for its study will be a major challenge to the emerging area.
So I hope like me, you are ready to learn more about Web Science. I may be one of the first people to have changed his business card to read “Web Scientist” – but there’s lots of room for more.
Happy Webbing
Jim Hendler
p.s. Keep an eye on this blog for discussion of lots of things Web — things like the difference between the Web and the Internet (no, they’re not the same!), the Semantic Web, eScience and data-intensive science and what the Web has to do with it, and other things that you as a scientist, and a citizen, should know about the Web. And, of course, this being the blogosphere, I will share some of my experiences as I head out into the world to learn about life as a “Web Scientist” – wait, no more scare quotes – we’re here to stay – make that life as a Web Scientist!
Welcome Jim. Looking forward to reading your posts. I’ve heard it said that the Web works better for finding cheap airfares and restaurants than it does for finding scientific resources. What’s your take on that?
My take is that that would be a great topic for one of my next blogs :-) More seriously, it is very field dependent at the moment – in bio and health science there has been a lot of money poured into creating and managing resources (but of course there is so much there to manage that it still seems hard), in astronomy there have been great community efforts, most funded by NASA, and various “virtual observatories” have been created. In other fields, you find open archives and such. My personal pet peeve is that so much of this is still focused on the “stovepipes” of our fields – so an inter/trans disciplinary researcher is basically stuck with using a search engine with little support when they wander outside the confines defined by the jargon of their home subdiscipline. This also gets to funding and other things – definitely a blogging topic…
Oooh, Corie is being provocative… I very much look forward to keeping an eye on this space. And congrats to NN to attracting another professor as well as the usual contingent of well-meaning folks still in training.
And along the lines of one of your links, it’s a Windows world for me, too, as long as my software is not supported on Linux. Photoshop being a big one of them, but also Ingenuity, SeqScape, and so forth. Anyone want to point a wet-lab biologist to how to create a simple aliquot- and sample-management PHP/MySQL database eg. “MySQL for biologist dummies”?
I very much look forward to seeing more in this blog! As I spend some time looking through your links, i wanted to ask you a couple of questions…
1)Online learning in webscience — a quick look at your wiki link listed curriculum suggestions, but is there a class I could take online about this?I will be searching through the info on that site, so i might find this myself.
2)I am NOT a computer scientist, i am a windows baby, could I still learn about/be involved in this field even if i am not a code writer type scientist?I am a wet-lab scientist who is finding more and more ways to collaborate online, and i really think these types of things could make a difference in my daily life at work, how people interact and spend their time.
3)What would be your first suggestion in getting what I might term as the “pre-web generation” of scientists to use web services available to them. I have found that scientists that left school >20yrs ago (and aren’t computer scientists) are really hesitant to use things currently available to them. Our company now has internal blogs, discussion boards, social networking, collaboration websites and there is a definite activation energy barrier (yep, science term, sorry i can be a dork too:), but the phrase really fits!) to getting them to use it. I recently graduated (3 yrs ago), and bioinformatics was a required course just for an undegraduate degree in science, but at work I found that some people didnt even know that when you submit information online, it goes to an external server somewhere!I actually got into an almost-arguement about this.
This comment is being added 11/2 to check whether blog is still working – feel free to ignore.