Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The time is ripe for a new interdisciplinary field in web science. That's the vision of some of the leading thinkers in the semantic web space, including Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in the U.K., as well as CTO of semantic web startup Garlik (see Semantic Web as Competitive Advantage).

Shadbolt led a consortium of five universities that secured a $14 million grant for the recently completed Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) research program, tasked with conducting research in the provision of technologies to support knowledge management and realize the promise of the semantic web. Some of the output of this project, in fact, helped lay the groundwork for Garlik's identity protection services, which is underpinned by semantic web technologies.

Semanticweb.com recently chatted with Prof. Shadbolt about one of the next items on his agenda: The Web Science Research Initiative, aimed at understanding what the web is, engineering its future, and ensuring its social benefit (visit webscience.org for additional information).

Semanticweb.com: Tell us more about why there needs to be a field of study in web science.

Shadbolt: This was a launch that Southampton and MIT announced, where we said the web is the most transformational construct in history. It is the largest information construct in history. But there isn't a subject or discipline that studies it as an object in its own right ...

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The skills and tools to look at the web in its totality, and understand and anticipate it, engineer it better, and understand its social effects, is kind of a new discipline, almost in the way computer science was 30 or 40 years ago. This is a call to action to get sociologists, economists, psychologists and computer scientists, to better understand this hybrid social-technology system. We think there is a need for an overall discipline that recognizes this thing we call the web as an object of study.

If you look back, imagine we had web science when the blogosphere took off. The blogosphere emerged in a hockey stick profile, it emerges and goes nuts, though there seems to be a slight trending down now. But what were the things that enabled the blogosphere to take off? You look at its development and the technology and protocols and you notice one or two key things that enabled the social motivation of the blog to kick in....You could come up with a method that would almost anticipate the software and social reinforcement and interactions [behind its emergence].

Something of the same thing is going on with the way social networks are being formed as well, and even in the Google effect. .... Once you produce this network effect you may need scientific tools to understand what the hell is the structure you produced. [The skill sets you need for this] you wouldn't encounter as a computer science major in standard courses.

Semanticweb.com: And where does the semantic web fit into all this?

Shadbolt: The semantic web in a sense is one of the most dramatic transformations of the web in the last decade or so. We are going from a web of documents to a web of data. To do that, and understand its consequences, to do that properly requires tools and methods we don't have yet.

Having done a lot of the core work in the semantic web, we can't do a lot of the rest of the work in the semantic web without understanding how the social effects arise, how a web of linked data will be navigated, or how provenance and trust of component pieces can be established.

Semanticweb.com: Assuming web science catches on as a field of study, how does that change things in the real world?

Shadbolt: You'd hope two things. One is that you could anticipate some effects. The future is an uncertain place, but you would have an ability to also look at trends and suggest there could be issues in advance of them snarling systems up. Whether it is spam with email, or fake web sites for Google indexing, there's a generic spoofing human behavior that you would perhaps take a view about how you did or didn't engineer that out of the system. ... I don't say we could understand and anticipate everything, but if you have people going out there with the skills to build and design or imagine a future system, you would like them to know a bit about the economics and sociology of social networks, so they understand some of the principles of what would and wouldn't work. And within web science, the core research questions are those of the semantic web. The methods and technologies of the semantic web are going to be a part of a web science curriculum. The use of semantics and ontologies and linked data sets -- they look to be where some of the challenges are for the next generation of web systems. Suppose we do link all this data up, what does a browser look for a web like that? What kind of machine assistance do you give them, and so on.

Semanticweb.com: These are some fascinating questions.

Shadbolt: Yes, and web science and the semantic web are great ways to energize young people to come into the subject. The computer science image is geeky, whereas people's experience of the web is essentially a social one, and we need to remind them that this social experiment requires technology and engineering.