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Web Science and the Social Machine Web Science and the Rise of the Social Machine November 2012 Written by Intersticia as a contribution to Web Science Australia Intersticia Pty Ltd ABN: 78 079 722 384 P.O. Box 1051, Crows Nest, NSW, 2065. Australia Email: [email protected] Table of Contents TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................... 2 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 3 SCIENCE AND THE WEB ................................................................................... 3 WHAT IS THE WEB? ......................................................................................... 4 Web 1.0 ................................................................................................................................................................................ 4 Web 2.0 ................................................................................................................................................................................ 4 The “Semantic” Web ...................................................................................................................................................... 5 THE BIRTH OF WEB SCIENCE .......................................................................... 7 WEB SCIENCE – SCOPE AND BREADTH ........................................................... 9 THE PUSH FOR “OPEN” .................................................................................. 10 THE WEB OBSERVATORY ................................................................................ 11 THE SOCIAL MACHINE .................................................................................... 11 GOVERNMENT AS A “SOCIAL MACHINE” ....................................................................................................................... 13 SOCIAM ............................................................................................................................................................................ 14 REAL WORLD BUSINESS PROBLEMS ............................................................. 15 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 16 AUTHOR ........................................................................................................... 17 WEB SCIENCE AUSTRALIA .............................................................................. 18 INTERSTICIA .................................................................................................... 18 REFERENCES ................................................................................................... 19 APPENDIX ONE: WHAT ARE “SEMANTIC” TECHNOLOGIES? ........................ 21 APPENDIX TWO - GLOSSARY OF TERMS ....................................................... 23 SEMANTIC WEB AND SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES ...................................................................................................... 23 TECHNICAL TERMINOLOGY ............................................................................................................................................ 24 The rise of the Social Machine – 2012 – © 2012 Intersticia Pty Ltd 2 Introduction In a paper entitled quite simply “Information Management: A Proposal”1 Tim Berners-Lee, then a consultant at CERN2, introduced the idea of “linked information systems” in order to address “the problems of information loss”. From the outset Berners-Lee felt that these problems were not peculiar to CERN but were there “in miniature of the rest of world in a few years time.” (Berners-Lee 1989) The system that Berners-Lee invented “went live” on his desktop in November 1990 and before long became known as the “World Wide Web”, the largest information fabric in the history of humanity with over 15 billion pages touching almost all aspects of modern life (Berners-Lee 2010). "What's exciting about the Web is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance. My hope is that those will produce new ways of working together effectively and fairly, which we can use globally to manage ourselves as a planet." For much of its existence the Web has quietly begun to underpin almost all aspects of modern commerce, governance and, with the evolution and growth of “social” technologies, everyday personal lives. However, as a social phenomenon, we understand very little about how it actually works, what impacts it is having on modern society and social norms, and what implications there might be as a result of these for the future. Science and the Web In the 1990’s, as the Web began to be used as a fundamental information and communications tool, researchers more fully utilised its resources, and the concept of “eScience” began to emerge. This approach was founded on the principles that: • The focus should be on everyday researchers doing everyday research, from all disciplines, via all devices, and utilising all digital artefacts; • There must be a data centric perspective where the data is rich, complex and real time, often generated locally and what is of interest is the interactions generated around the data itself; • Collaboration and participation are crucial, where the focus in on publishing results and ideas as they evolve through digital mechanisms and platforms; • The Web enables digital scale and the ability to utilise collaborative filtering, automatic recommendations based on previous activity, and metadata generation through tagging and reviews; • Research must be increasingly open through the use of Open Archives and “Commons” licencing; • Focus on “Better not perfect”, adopting a more agile and flexible approach to the use and development of tools, which results in the empowerment of researchers; and • eScience exists at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds and thus is underpinned by “pervasive computing”. (Hall, De Roure et al. 2009) 1 http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html 2 CERN is The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, http://public.web.cern.ch/public/ The rise of the Social Machine – 2012 – © 2012 Intersticia Pty Ltd 3 But “eScience” was predominantly seen as a research tool, whereas “the Web” was becoming much more than that, it was becoming a representation of society in action on all levels – individual, groups and organisations. It was becoming as much “humanity as the web” as it was “humanity on the web”. What is the Web? When Berners-Lee invented his information management system he envisaged a virtual space within which humans and information technologies could seamlessly interact in order to share, learn and create. In addition, the idea was something that was simple, would provide an intuitive experience, and would connect the information whilst simultaneously respecting and acknowledging peoples’ individual ways of working and the myriad of applications that existed. It was a “web” that connected, not a “web” that cocooned, and it relied on openness, sharing, transparency and trust. These fundamental principles ensured that within a decade the Web had gradually become a publishing platform through which all of the world’s information could be connected and accessed like nothing else previously. This, however, is taking time and within its short life the Web has already gone through a number of very distinct phases. Web 1.0 A common understanding of the “evolution” of the web centres largely on the development of the technologies themselves. From its earliest beginnings “Web 1.0” embodied the creation of hyperlinked electronic pages navigable through a language called HTML hosted in different servers. Essentially Web 1.0 was founded on the traditional “publishing” mindset where electronic documents were rendered on screens for delivery to relatively passive end users. The technology infrastructure underpinning Web 1.0 operated on the industrial model of pushing out information, and, as with traditional print and publishing, was predominantly the domain of businesses and organisations because skilled web-designers and programmers were required to create websites and the systems that supported them. Web 2.0 As new technologies developed so did the ability of individuals to be able to create, edit and share content themselves, and thus was born “Web 2.0” (O'Reilly 2005). Web 2.0 has brought about a democratisation of electronic publishing because of the ease with which any individual, with access to a computer connected to the Web, can publish electronic content, at a very low price and with very little technical expertise. Web 2.0 is very much “the peoples’ web” and provides a stark contrast with the command and control approach that underpins most traditional information technology systems.3 3 In an interview with the author one individual described Web 2.0 as “inspirational”, precisely because of the power of the individual to utilise it, whereas those within organisations are still largely restricted by corporate IT systems and processes. This is what is underpinning the ‘BYOD’ movement as well as the challenge for CIO’s to control the “IT anarchy” that is a resulting phenomenon of Web 2.0. The rise of the Social Machine – 2012 – © 2012 Intersticia Pty Ltd 4 The “Semantic” Web With the increasing ease of creating new information comes a corresponding difficulty of coping with the inevitable “information overload” that results (Wurman 2001; Wright 2006). It is all very easy to “search”
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