In the past decade, the Web has become one of the most used and transformative social applications in the history of human communications. Our everyday use of the Web depends on fundamental developments in computer science that took place long before the Web was invented. Today?s search engines, for example, are based on developments in information retrieval with a legacy going back to the 1960s. The innovations of the 1990s provided the crucial algorithms underlying the modern search engines that are so fundamental to Web use. Many interesting aspects of Web use, such as social networking, tagging, data integration, information retrieval, and Web ontologies, have emerged as ?social computing? at some of the top information schools and computing programs. However, in too many cases the Web is studied exclusively as a technical or social artifact rather than as an object of study in its own right, whose architectural properties actively shape the human interactions it supports.
The results of this project will define interdisciplinary methodologies that can be used to help develop the critical science, technology, and eventually curriculum at the heart of the emerging interdisciplinary field of Web Science. We will focus on establishing the methods of understanding and developing systems that allow large numbers of users to work together to form communities to solve scientific and social problems.
