Internet and Web Science
The Internet and the World Wide Web are key infrastructures of the emerging networked world and have a profound impact on our daily life. They drastically change the way people communicate and find information, but they also affect how companies do business and how scientists and professionals collaborate. Many applications now exist, such as virtual worlds, e-business, peer-to-peer file sharing of music and video, electronic markets, Internet telephony, radio and TV, and virtual laboratories. Many other innovative applications will appear, especially as mobile and location-aware devices like smart phones and other devices get connected to the Internet. They will even change our personal environment at work and at home.
The “Internet and Web Science” research programme focuses on the technological and computational aspects of networks, and how they interact with applications and users.
It addresses fundamental research about communication, scalability, security, networked intelligence and self-organization, as well as more application-directed research.
Computer-based models and systems have proven themselves well suited for analysis, design, scenario simulation, prediction generation, etcetera, in many different fields: cognition and communication, economics, service innovation, virtual labs and e-science, and in fact the construction and behaviour of software applications and services itself.