The document discusses the promise of web science as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the world wide web. It outlines how perspectives of the web have evolved from a database to a digital library to a cognitive and socio-cognitive space. The need for web science is described to better understand, engineer, and ensure the social benefits of the evolving web. Key aspects of web science include building models of web phenomena through an observatory approach and taking both observational and engineering perspectives.

1. PROMISE OF “WEB SCIENCE”
Aastha Madaan
Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Web Sciences Lab, IIIT-Bangalore
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2. THE WORLD WIDE WEB
Image courtesy: http://endtimestruth.com/mark-of-the-
beast/rise-internet/
Image courtesy: http://gizmodo.com/5903342/the-first-ever-proposal-
for-the-internet-was-judged-vague-but-exciting/
• What started as a means to manage documents has become
an integral part of our lives
• Web has travelled a long way - from being considered as a
Very Large Database, Digital Library, A Cognitive Extension
of ourselves to a Socio-cognitive space
• With around 400 million users world wide feeding the Web
every day, the Web is growing at an unprecedented scale
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3. WEB: A VERY LARGE DATABASE *
• Early approaches on in the mid 90s modelled the Web as a database
• Focus on the semi-structured nature of the Web and as a special case of managing
structured database (RDBMS)
• Research Objectives: Structured and rich query semantics
• Examples include [5], WebQL [6]
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Image courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebQL
* Slide source: [4]

4. WEB: A DIGITAL LIBRARY *
• Shift from:
– Strict notions of “query”  Looser notions of “retrieval” and
“relevance”
– Strict notions of “schema”  Looser notion of “ontology”
• Emphasis still on retrieving information
• Still Web is considered as a “Passive Repository” of
information
12-11-2016 * Slide source: [4]

5. WEB: COGNITIVE EXTENSION OF
OURSELVES *
• Rooted in Vannevar Bush’s interpretation of hypertext reflecting the way
information is organized in human beings
• Focus on interpreting hyperlinks, rather than data on Web pages
• Hyperlink as an : Attention pathway, endorsement, and relevance indicator
• Examples: PageRank [7], HITS [8]
12-11-2016 * Slide source: [4]

6. WEB: A SOCIO-COGNITIVE SPACE *
• Characteristic of Web 2.0
• Web : an active, participatory, social space
• Shift of emphasis from retrieving information from the Web to engaging
users on the Web
• Elements of socio-cognitive space paradigm:
– Crowdsourcing
– Wikis
– Social media and information diffusion modelling
• Web users considered as “Web Participants”
12-11-2016 * Slide source: [4]

7. PERSPECTIVES OF THE WEB
• Web is a threat ?
– Privacy/Freedom/Legal issues
• Web is an opportunity?
– Ample research opportunities – understand actors and agents,
emotional contagion and several cognitive science theories
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8. 12-11-2016 * Slide/Image source: [4]
One or more
“State of Web”
modelling
centre(s)
Distributed
grid of “Web
Observatories”
Strategic,
aggregate-
level,
declarative
inputs to
social media
websites

9. NEED for WEB SCIENCE
• Today we live in a Web dependent society, where our culture, our behavior is being shaped by the Web when
we are still thinking we are shaping the Web
• The Web – most successful information architecture in history (- Wendy Hall)
• How are we going to –
• Understand the Web
• Engineer the future Web
• Ensure its social benefit
• A term coined by Berners Lee, et al., [1,2] to describe an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web
• Quoting from [2]: “The Web must be studied as an entity in its own right to ensure it keeps flourishing and
prevent unanticipated social effects.”
• Focus on building models of web-based phenomena and its impact, rather than on building the web itself Web
as a socio-cognitive space
• Unlike a machine, the web is not an extension of our capabilities. It is a “space” in which we dwell – a space
where laws of physics don't necessarily apply!
• We are “participants” rather than “users” of the web . The web uses us at least as much as we use the web
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10. WEB SCIENCE: An INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH
• Web is multi-faceted and extensible
• Web evolves in response to various pressures from science, commerce, the public and
politics [9]
• It’s a science of decentralised information structures is essential for understanding how
informal and unplanned informational links between [9]:
– People
– Agents
– Databases
– Organisations
– Other actors and Resources
meet the informational needs of important drivers such as e-science and e-government.
• Two handles of Web Science:
– Study the Web (Observation and Experimentation)
– Engineer the Web
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11. DISTRIBUTED GRID of WEB OBSERVATORIES
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Image courtesy: webscience.me
• Observatory aims to provide a distributed archive of
data and activity on the Web, as well as methodologies
and tools to explore its evolution in the past and
through time.
Each observatory observing
phenomena on the “Milky Web”
The “Milky Web”
• Web Observatory: An environment to enable interdisciplinary Web Science research

12. 12-11-2016
The Web Observatory: A Middle Layer for Broad Data. (2014). Tiropanis, T, Hall, W, Hendler, J A, De Larinaga, C. Big Data, 2(3).

13. BUILDING WEB OBSERVATORY
12-11-2016 *Image source: [10]

14. RESEARCH ROADMAP
• Social machines interacting with social machines
• Social machines to observe/catalogue other social machines
• Interlinking the Web Observatories
• Standards for information and tools in the web observatories
• Need for bottom-up approaches that involve :
– (i)sharing of data before agreeing on how or whether they should be
annotated, and
– (ii) understanding how the engagement of individuals related to shaping
the Web and to driving Web innovation.
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15. WEB SCIENCES LAB – IIIT-B
• You can read more about us at:
– http://cds.iiitb.ac.in/~wsl/
• Headed by Prof. Srinath Srinivasa
• Lab has 1 post-doc, 10 research scholars (PhD + MS by Research
Scholars), 20 MTech students
• Part of Centre of data Sciences at IIIT-Bangalore
• Active research areas at the lab:
– Technologies for the web, web-scale data management, web mining, network
analysis and socio-cognitive models of web dynamics
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16. WSL: WEB SCIENCE INITIATIVES
• Web Observatory – IIIT-B node (Feb, 2015)
– http://webobservatory.iiitb.ac.in/
• Web Science India Endowment
– Initiated in September 2015
– http://wsie.iiitb.ac.in:4040/
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17. REFERENCES
1. Berners Lee, T.; Hall, W.; Hendler, J.; Shadbolt, N.; Weitzner, D. (2006). "Computer Science: Enhanced: Creating
a Science of the Web". Science 313 (5788): 769–771. doi:10.1126/science.1126902. PMID 16902115.
2. Hendler, Jim; Shadbolt, Nigel; Hall, Wendy; BernersLee, Tim; Weitzner, Daniel (2008). "Web science: an
interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web“ (PDF). Communications of the ACM 51(7).
doi:10.1145/1364782.1364798.
3. Srinath Srinivasa, Abastraction and Expression on the Web http://www.slideshare.net/srinaths/abstraction-and-
expression-on-the-web?qid=be64413e-eee7-4a62-aae4-a17ef838b275&v=qf1&b=&from_search=7
4. Srinath Srinivasa, “Mindful Web”, Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, http://www.slideshare.net/srinaths/towards-a-
mindful-web?next_slideshow=1
5. Gustavo Arocena , Alberto O. Mendelzon , George A. Mihaila, Applications of a Web Query Language, Proc. 6th
International World Wide Web Conference, 1997
6. Carlos F. Enguix, Database querying on the World Wide Web: UniGuide, an object-relational search engine for
Australian universities, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Volume 30, Issues 1–7, April 1998, Pages 567-
572, ISSN 0169-7552, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00080-4.
7. Brin, Sergey, and Lawrence Page. "Reprint of: The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine."
Computer networks 56.18 (2012): 3825-3833.
8. Ian Horrocks, Deborah L. McGuinness, and Christopher A. Welty. 2003. Digital libraries and web-based
information systems. In The description logic handbook, Franz Baader, Diego Calvanese, Deborah L.
McGuinness, Daniele Nardi, and Peter F. Patel-Schneider (Eds.). Cambridge University Press, New York, NY,
USA 427-449.
9. Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, William H. Dutton Phil. Introduction: Web science: a new
frontier, Trans. R. Soc. A 2013 371 20120512; DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2012.0512. Published 18 February 2013
10. Tiropanis, T., Hall, W., Shadbolt, N., De Roure, D., Contractor, N., & Hendler, J. (2013). The web science
observatory. IEEE Intelligent Systems, (2), 100-104.
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