The Web Science Trust is a joint effort originally started between MIT and University of Southampton to bridge and formalize the social and technical aspects of the World Wide Web. The Trust now coordinates a set of international "WSTnet Laboratories" that include many of the top academic research groups in this emerging area.
It was first announced at MIT on November 2, 2006 as the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), changing its name in 2009 to the Web Science Trust.[1] Tim Berners-Lee is leading the program that also aims to attract government and private funds, and is now involved in creating new undergraduate and graduate curricula. Given the similarities between Web Science and Information Science, Web Science overlaps with the interests of the ISchool movement [2], particularly in the United States, but focuses more specifically on the Web itself.
Some initial areas of interest are:
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Directors
The first Web Science conference (WebSci09: Society on Line) was sponsored in part by WSRI and was held in Greece in March 2009. The conference had over 300 registrants from a number of fields including computing, social science, law, economics, philosophy, psychology. The second conference was held in Raleigh-Durham co-located with WWW 2010, and the third was held in Koblenz Germany.
| Conference | Date | Place | Keynote speakers | registrants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACM WebSci'11 - International Conference on Web Science 2011 | 14-17 June | Koblenz, Germany | Barry Wellman, Jaime Teevan | |
| Web Science 2010 | 26 & 27 April | Raleigh, North Carolina, USA | Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Jennifer Chayes, Melissa R. Gilbert | |
| Web Science 2009 | 18–20 March | Athens, Greece | Noshir Contractor, Nigel Shadbolt, Jacques Bus, Sir Tim Berners-Lee | 300+ |
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