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 Web Science Observatory

Mar 10, 2021

The Web Science Observatory

The Web Science Observatory (or simply the Web Observatory) has been a key concept in the development of tools to help us understand how the Web develops in concert with human input. The project seeks to enable the sharing of data sets globally to allow for complex and nuanced analysis of Web interactions that may not be possible for individual research groups. Industry has strongly taken up the Web Observatoy concept with companies offering deep anlaysis to governments and corporations that can pay for them. The question remains whether the public will be equally served by sharing data for the common good.

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Published: 2013

Tiropanis, Thanassis, Hall, Wendy, Shadbolt, Nigel, De Roure, David, Contractor, Noshir and Hendler, Jim (2013) The Web Science Observatory. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 28 (2), 100-104.