Web Sciences and Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee and three other pioneers began something at Web Science. Teachers need to follow these developments because they may result in a new curriculum or degree track called web sciences that unites all the diverse and uncoordinated threads we now have running that all lead to some sort of training in web technologies. They define web sciences like this:

When we discuss an agenda for a science of the Web, we use the term “science” in two ways. Physical and biological science analyzes the natural world, and tries to find microscopic laws that, extrapolated to the macroscopic realm, would generate the behavior observed. Computer science, by contrast, though partly analytic, is principally synthetic: It is concerned with the construction of new languages and algorithms in order to produce novel desired computer behaviors. Web science is a combination of these two features. The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur.

You might also be interested in Tim Berners-Lee’s testimony before Congress where he said, “The Web’s next most important application is likely being dreamed up somewhere by someone, quite likely a woman.”

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