01/05/2023

PROMISE OF “WEB SCIENCE”

Aastha MadaanPost-doctoral Research Fellow

Web Sciences Lab, IIIT-Bangalore

01/05/2023

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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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]

Image courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebQL

* Slide source: [4]

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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

* Slide source: [4]

01/05/2023

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]

* Slide source: [4]

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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”

* Slide source: [4]

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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

01/05/2023 * 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

01/05/2023

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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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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DISTRIBUTED GRID of WEB OBSERVATORIES

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

01/05/2023The Web Observatory: A Middle Layer for Broad Data. (2014). Tiropanis, T, Hall, W, Hendler, J A, De Larinaga, C. Big Data, 2(3).

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BUILDING WEB OBSERVATORY

*Image source: [10]

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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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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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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/

REFERENCES1. 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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