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The Web has become such a force in commerce and culture that a group of leading university researchers now deems it worthy of its own field of study. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain plan to announce that they are starting a joint research program in Web science.
Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on ’the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized (分散的) Web systems work.
"The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers," Mr. Berners-Lee, a senior researcher at M. I. T. , said. "It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web."
The Web science program is an academic effort, but corporate technology executives and computer scientists said the research could greatly influence Web-based businesses. They pointed in particular to research by Mr. Berners-Lee and others to build more" intelligence" into the Web-moving toward what is known as the Semantic Web-as an area of study that could yield a big payoff.
Web science is related to another emerging interdisciplinary (各学科间的) field called services science. This is the study of how to use computing, collaborative networks and knowledge in disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology to lift productivity and develop new products in the services sector, which represents about three-fourths of the United States economy. Services science research is being supported by technology companies like IBM, Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.
Web science research, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology strategist at IBM and visiting professor at MIT, is"a prerequisite (先决条件) to designing and building the kinds of complex ,human-oriented systems that we are after in services science. " Mr. Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the M. I. T. have had preliminary discussions with government agencies in the United States and Europe that finance scientific research, as well as with leading technology companies. But Mr. Berners-Lee said his group had decided to publicly circulate their ideas about Web science before trying to attract government, foundation and corporate funding.