The amount of information on the Web is enormous and growing exponentially. Indeed, it is a major challenge to measure the amount of information contained in the Web. It is even harder to assess how much of this information is useful or original. In addition, the information on the Web comes in a huge range […]
All economic, social and legal interactions are based on certain assumptions: that individuals can verify identities; can rely on the rules and institutions governing the interactions; and are assured that certain information will remain private. These assumptions are challenged by the Web: an environment where security, privacy and trust can be very difficult to monitor, […]
The Web is different from most hitherto-studied systems in that it is changing at a rate which is of the same order as, or maybe greater than, our ability to observe it. This introduces many new inter-disciplinary research challenges. How are we to instrument the Web and how can we log it or identify behaviours? […]
The Web, as it exists today, is a complex mixture of open, public areas and closed, private zones. There are prominent advocates of both positions: those that maintain that the Web must be based on open platforms; those that argue that property rights provide the strongest incentive for innovation in the Web. There has been […]
Collective intelligence is the surprising result of collaborative endeavour with only light rules of co-ordination that lead to the emergence of large-scale, coherent resources (such as Wikipedia). The existence and stability of these resources present major challenges for all the researchers engaged in Web Science. How, from a technical point of view, can collective intelligence […]
Techniques for representing and reasoning over legal and social rules – what new tools need to be developed within legal theory to explore and understand the impact of law as a driver in shaping the Web development? Should law be a catalyst for change or merely reactive to it and how should it interact and […]
What are the economics of Web 2.0 (+)? What new economic issues are raised by the opportunities that Web 2.0 gives for users to generate content and share it in self-forming networks? What are the economic forces that shape the formation of social networks on the Web? What are the properties of those networks? What […]
How can we develop inter-disciplinary epistemologies that will enable us to understand the Web as a complex socio-technical phenomenon? How can we do mixed methods research to explore the relations between ethnographic insights to Web practice and the emergence of the Web at the macro level? How can we draw on new data sources e.g. […]
How do we model the transient or ephemeral Web? Billions of Web pages are dynamically generated; they exist for the period of a particular query or transaction. How do we model this graph beneath the graph that is the Web? How are Bayesian or other uncertainty representations best used within the Web? What is the […]
With the emergence of the so-called Linked Data Web or Semantic Web a key emerging challenge as we move from a Web of documents to a Web of linked data at a more fine-grained level is how we are to browse, explore and query such a Web at scale. Collective Intelligence is the surprising result […]