Bitwacker Associates

“The interdisciplinary study of the technological and social constructs behind large networks such as the World Wide Web”

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. In one early talk Tim Berners-Lee characterized the Web Science Method as “the process of designing things in a very large space.

Web scientists at pioneering research centers including the Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA), the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton (UK) and the Decentralized Information Group at MIT (USA) 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 the Web Science Trust’s So What is Web Science? page!

The Web Science Research Center at RPI is affiliated with the Tetherless World Constellation , a leader in Semantic Web and Web Science research and technologies.

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.