Feb 16, 2012 | Research Roadmap
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 is the relationship between the economic structure of the Web, its social and mathematical structure?
What are the commercial incentives created by the Web? What will be the industrial structure? Is the Web inherently prone to concentration, where a large part of the structure is owned and controlled by a small number of players? Or are there forces that will allow smaller scale operations to co-exist with large firms?
What are the economic arguments for and against open platforms in the Web? Should policy (economic and public) play any role in shaping or determining the openness of Web platforms?
What (economic and social) mechanisms can be designed to improve the performance of the Web? For example, are there mechanisms that can improve the extent and quality of participation in online communities?
How can economics help with such issues as piracy, privacy and identity?
Feb 16, 2012 | Research Roadmap
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. digital records of network use to develop understanding of the sociological aspects of the Web?
What are the on-going iterative relations between use and design of the Web?
How and why do people use newly emergent forms of the Web in the way that they do? What kinds of sociological and psychological concepts do we need to understand this? What implications does this have for our understanding of key sociological categories, e.g. kinship, gender, race, class and community, and vice versa? What implications does this have for our understanding of psychological constructs, e.g. personal and group identity, collaborative decision making, perception and attitudes.
How is the Web situated within networks of power and in relation to social inequalities? To what extent might the Web offer empowering political resources? How might the Web change further as new populations access it?
Feb 16, 2012 | Research Roadmap
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 topological structure of the Web? Can connections always be established between its various parts, or do particular dynamic and time-dependent conditions create disconnected or sub- regions within it?
A particular query about a given subject may organize Web pages, existing or virtual, according to “how close they are” with respect to the given search criteria. This changes the virtual “shape” of the Web, as observed by the user. Given the huge numbers of searches performed simultaneously, the Web, at any given moment, will present a different structure to different users. It is a mathematical challenge to develop tools to describe this structure.
How do we measure the level of complexity of the Web? For a graph, this can be done by finding a linear space of a lowest dimension in which the graph will fit as a metric subspace. Such techniques are studied in pure mathematics and also in computer science.
Feb 16, 2012 | Research Roadmap
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 that collaborative endeavour with only light rules of social coordination can lead to the emergence of large-scale, coherent resources such as Wikipedia. What are the characteristics of such resources? Why do people contribute and how do they maintain a highly stable core body of connected content?
How do we support inference at a Web scale? What types of reasoning are possible? How is context represented and supported in Web inference?
How are concepts such as trust and provenance computationally represented, maintained and repaired on the Web?
As the Web has grown substantial amounts of it have become disconnected, atrophied or in others ways redundant. How are we to identify such necrotic and non-functional parts of the Web and what should be done about them?
