Bitwacker Associates

The new field of Web Science positions the World Wide Web as an object of scientific study unto itself. Web Science recognizes the Web as a transformational, disruptive technology, and its practitioners focus on understanding it and its components, its facets and its characteristics.

Web scientists at pioneering research centers including the Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA) and the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Southampton (UK) search for answers to questions like:

• What processes have driven the Web’s growth, and will they persist?
• How does large-scale structure emerge from a simple set of protocols?
• How does the Web work as a socio-technical system?
• What drives the viral uptake of certain Web phenomena?
• What might fragment the Web?

For more information, check out presentations and videos from the Royal Society’s two-day discussion event Web Science: a new frontier (September 2010).

The web site of the Web Science Trust is also a great source of information and links to upcoming events in the web science community.

Web Science 2011, the third annual gathering of the web science research community, will be held in Koblenz, Germany 15-17 June 2011.

John S. Erickson, Ph.D. of Bitwacker Associates and the Tetherless World Constellation at RPI was an invited project facilitator at the 2009 Web Science Summer Research Week, hosted by TWC. In the photo to the left John enjoys student presentations with Nigel Shadbolt (center) and Jim Hendler (right), both Directors and Trustees of the Web Science Trust.