The social interactions that glue the World Wide Web together are now so complex it has outgrown the relatively narrow field of computer science, say pioneering internet researchers.
鈥淵ou can鈥檛 tell how something will spread just by looking at how the html code works,鈥� says Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the hypertext code that connected the first web pages back in 1989, and who now works as a researcher at MIT in the US.
To fully harness the web鈥檚 potential, Berners-Lee says, 鈥渨eb science鈥� must include elements of social science, psychology, economics and law, along with computer science and engineering.
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鈥淭he web as a structure has got so large that we need new forms of analysis to understand its properties,鈥� adds Nigel Shadbolt, who heads the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group at the University of Southampton in the UK. On 2 November, scientists from that university and MIT launched a collaboration aimed at promoting such analysis, called the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), pronounced 鈥渨iz-ree鈥�.
Make it better
The initiative will, for example, study the ways social networks, blogs, e-commerce and government regulation all contribute to the web鈥檚 overall structure. This should help academics and businesses alike, say the initiative鈥檚 founders.
鈥淲e are doing this partly out of excitement, partly out of duty,鈥� says Berners-Lee. 鈥淲e have a duty to understand [the web] because if we can make it better, we should make it better.鈥�
杏吧原创s have long studied the web鈥檚 network topology and come up with various hypotheses to explain its structure. For example, the 鈥渟mall world鈥� hypothesis says that any person can be connected to any other person through just six online acquaintances.
Iceberg鈥檚 tip
The 鈥渟cale-free鈥� proposal concludes that some parts of the network are more vulnerable than others because they have points that connect a huge number of other points 鈥� so destroying a these 鈥渉ubs鈥� can disrupt the entire network.
But these hypotheses are just the tip of the iceberg, says Shadbolt. Further studying the intersection between computing and social science will shine light on how and why these connections form in the first place.
Google famously harnessed one aspect of the web鈥檚 structure to create its search engine. The company鈥檚 search algorithms examine the frequency and quality of web links to determine how relevant a web page is to a particular search query.
Building businesses
Wendy Hall, another researcher at the University of Southampton, says Google, Amazon and eBay have all exploited the complex interplay between social science and computer science to build their businesses. 鈥淭hey only work because people use them,鈥� she says. 鈥淎nd the more people that use them, the better they become.鈥�
A better understanding of the way the web works could also help to protect people online, says Daniel Weitzner, a lawyer from MIT and another a founding member of WSRI. Currently, he says, 鈥渢he web is particularly bad at helping people to replicate the social expectations and legal expectations that we all function with in society鈥�.
Students who chose to study web science may, for example, examine ways to make public information available through the web without violating personal privacy. Or they might study how data distributed over multiple servers can best be searched. 鈥淥ne thing that is difficult for computer science is querying in a distributed fashion,鈥� says Shadbolt. 鈥淗ow do you do that in an efficient way?鈥�
Ultimately, Hall says, the aim is to create a new breed of scientist: 鈥淲hat we really want is for people around the world to start calling themselves web scientists.鈥�
