Web science

Understanding the Web is a problem on a par with other complex scientific challenges such as climate change or the human genome. The requirement for understanding should ideally be accompanied by some measure of control, which makes Web Science crucial in the future provision of tools for managing our interactions, our politics, our economics, our entertainment, and – not least – our knowledge and data sharing. The Web is a critical infrastructure that underpins increasingly many of our transactions, and yet is barely understood by policymakers. The theme of emergence is discussed as the characteristic phenomenon of web-scale applications, where many unrelated micro-level actions and decisions, uninformed by knowledge about the macro-level, still produce noticeable and coherent effects at the scale of the Web.

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.