Web Science


Thank to my friend Alireza who informed me about ‘Web Science’. Recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain are going to start a joint research program in Web science. Based on this piece of news in the New York Times, web science “… has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science … to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the web … web science … shifts the centre of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized web systems work. In particular I like the quotation form Berners-Lee in the news who said: “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.”

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