I want to thank Miha Kralj for this post to the architectural Diggs. Web Science is where it is at. I think Web Science is the secret sauce to cross-group collaboration. It will also have a huge affect on Rich Internet Applications. When I think back it was "Web Science" in 1994 that made me change Master Degree program from Biology to Computer Science. It was the Web that really made me get into Computers as a profession versus just a hobby... before the birth of the Web... I was sloted for a career in Molecular biology. Hopefully Professor Shneiderman's Web Science ideas can excite North Americans students into computer science degrees just as it did for me.

Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science

Much more than a provocative term, “Web science” signals a new way of thinking about computer science. Computer science researchers and professionals are familiar with the turbulence of technology innovation; Web science promoters challenge them to expand the scope of computer science. Indeed, declining enrollment and industry shifts have shaken computer science, so Web science promises to be an invigorating direction.

Ben Shneiderman  a  Computer Science professor from University of Maryland at Collect Park  published this paper in the Communications of the ACM June 2007/Vol.50, No.6.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/ShneidermanCACM6-2007.pdf

Here is a long quote from Shneiderman paper and I could not agree more.

quote <<

Writing in Science magazine last August, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and collaborators called for a new discipline
[3] and detailed their case in an online 130-page monograph [2]. These esteemed revolutionaries
offered a visionary manifesto that says that after 40 years of focusing on computer science, it is time for
computer scientists to shift to Web science [9]. Their starting definition of the new discipline is
the “science of decentralized information systems”; they followed with a rich research agenda of emerging
technologies, including the Semantic Web, ontologies, Web services, and Web-scale computing.
...
"the Web as a technology is socially embedded."
...

Berners-Lee says, “The most important thing about the World Wide Web is that it is universal”

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