Privacy, Privacy Enhancing Technologies & the Individual

Mar 14, 2022

Privacy, Privacy Enhancing Technologies & the Individual

Law has granted individuals some rights over the use of data about them, but data protection rights have not redressed the balance between the individual and the tech giants. A number of approaches aim to augment personal rights to allow individuals to police their own information space, facilitating informational self-determination. This reports reviews this approach to privacy protection, explaining how controls have generally been conceived either as the use of technology to aid individuals in this policing task, or the creation of further legal instruments to augment their powers. It focuses on two recent attempts to secure or support data protection rights, one using technology and the other the law. The former is called Solid, a decentralised platform for linked data, while the latter is a novel application of trust law to develop data trusts in which individuals’ data is managed by a trustee with the individuals as beneficiaries. The report argues that structural impediments make it hard for thriving, diverse ecosystems of Solid apps or data trusts to achieve critical mass – a problem that has traditionally haunted this empowering approach.

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PUBLISHED 2022

KIERON O’HARA

The Web Observatory Extension: Facilitating Web Science Collaboration through Semantic Markup

Mar 11, 2021

The Web Observatory Extension: Facilitating Web Science Collaboration through Semantic Markup

The multi-disciplinary nature of Web Science and the large size and diversity of data collected and studied by its practitioners has inspired a new type of Web resource known as the Web Observatory. Web observatories are platforms that enable researchers to collect, analyze and share data about the Web and to share tools for Web research. At the Boston Web Observatory Workshop 2013, a semantic model for describing Web Observatories was drafted and an extension to the schema.org microdata vocabulary collection was proposed. This paper details our implementation of the proposed extension, and how we have applied it to the Web Observatory Portal created by the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (TWC RPI). We recognize this effort to be the “first-step” in the construction, evaluation and validation of the Web observatory model and not the final recommendation. Our hope is that this extension recommendation and our initial implementation sparks additional discussion among the Web Science community of on whether such direction enables Web Observatory curators to better expose and explain their individual Web Observatories to others, thereby enabling better collaboration between researchers across the Web Science community.
Published 2014 DiFranzo, Dominic, Erickson, John S, Gloria, Marie Joan Kristine T, Luciano, Joanne S, McGuinness, Deborah L and Hendler, James DOI: 10.1145/2567948.2576936

Web Evolution and Web Science

Mar 11, 2021

Web Evolution and Web Science

This paper examines the evolution of the World Wide Web as a network of networks and discusses the emergence of Web Science as an interdisciplinary area that can provide us with insights on how the Web developed, and how it has affected and is affected by society. Through its different stages of evolution, the Web has gradually changed from a technological network of documents to a network where documents, data, people and organisations are interlinked in various and often unexpected ways. It has developed from a technological artefact separate from people to an integral part of human activity that is having an increasingly significant impact on the world. This paper outlines the lessons from this retrospective examination of the evolution of the Web, presents the main outcomes of Web Science activities and discusses directions along which future developments could be anticipated.
Published 2012 Wendy Hall, Thanassis Tiropanis https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2012.10.004

The Web Observatory: A Middle Layer for Broad Data

Mar 11, 2021

The Web Observatory: A Middle Layer for Broad Data

The Web Observatory project is a global effort that is being led by the Web Science Trust, its network of WSTnet laboratories, and the wider Web Science community. The goal of this project is to create a global distributed infrastructure that will foster communities exchanging and using each other’s web-related datasets as well as sharing analytic applications for research and business web applications.

It will provide the means to observe the digital planet, explore its processes, and understand their impact on different sectors of human activity.

The project is creating a network of separate web observatories, collections of datasets and tools for analyzing data about the Web and its use, each with their own use community. This allows researchers across the world to develop and share data, analytic approaches, publications related to their datasets, and tools.

The network of web observatories aims to bridge the gap that currently exists between big data analytics and the rapidly growing web of “broad data,” making it difficult for a large number of people to engage with them.

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Published: 2014 Thanassis Tiropanis, Wendy Hall, James Hendler, Christian de Larrinaga http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/big.2014.0035

The Theory and Practice of Social Machines

Mar 10, 2021

The Theory and Practice of Social Machines

Social machines are a type of network connected by interactive digital devices made possible by the ubiquitous adoption of technologies such as the Internet, the smartphone, social media and the read/write World Wide Web, connecting people at scale to document situations, cooperate on tasks, exchange information, or even simply to play. Existing social processes may be scaled up, and new social processes enabled, to solve problems, augment reality, create new sources of value, and disrupt existing practice. This book considers what talents one would need to understand or build a social machine, describes the state of the art, and speculates on the future, from the perspective of the EPSRC project SOCIAM – The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. The aim is to develop a set of tools and techniques for investigating, constructing and facilitating social machines, to enable us to narrow down pragmatically what is becoming a wide space, by asking ‘when will it be valuable to use these methods on a sociotechnical system?’ The systems for which the use of these methods adds value are social machines in which there is rich person-to-person communication, and where a large proportion of the machine’s behaviour is constituted by human interaction.
Published: 2019 Shadbolt, N., O’Hara, K., De Roure, D., Hall, D.W.