Web science is essentially a new scientific discipline. Since the web has become a powerful vehicle that drives technology, commerce and pop culture, Berners-Lee and his group of researchers believe it’s worthy of a separate field of study. The group intends to explore social networking trends and aspects of the social science significance of the web. The study also will examine people’s behavioral patterns on the Internet.
“The web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Berners-Lee 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.”
Additionally, web science studies will examine more technical aspects like Internet privacy and how large decentralized web systems work.
"What we’re saying is that it's becoming so important that things like Wikipedia are being created, new business models are emerging and that it's changing our lives so much that we have to have a science to understand this," Berners-Lee told the BBC.
Berners-Lee said the specific science of studying the web is necessary because of its rapidly changing nature, and that conducting market research is does not encompass other crucial elements like sociology and psychology — components that web science will cover, combined with the underlying technology.
“The new web has to be powerful,” Berner-Lee said. “It has to have features that it doesn’t have at the moment. These features should allow us to express the social properties of information which specify what it is, where it’s from and how trustworthy it is.”
