What is web science?

This post is WIP as part of an exercise preparing for a symposium which we plan to hold in Montpellier some time in May. As I worked through the process I was reminded that a key topic in web science is provenance and trust. I also understand that web science is of course inter-disciplinary, but suggest that the phrase 'web science' is going through an extended period of "negotiated understanding of meaning".

I am interested in definitions and explanations manifest via text, images and videos. I am taking the canonical web pages as coming from WebScience.org - and will provide links to various classic definitions, but at this stage I am also particularly interested in what people outside of the web science trust think web science is. That means I will be interested in the differences and similarities between the canonical and emerging definitions, and seeing if I can make any inferences from that data.

Coming from Southampton, teaching on our Web Science Masters and having been at the finges of Web Science since its inception, I have a bit of an idea to begin with, and of course turn to the classic XXXX cluster diagram we all know and love.

you can take the simple version

or the more elaborate version

Nigel Shadbolt's WebScience Cluster Diagram

if you go to the web science trust facebook page you will find that people have been tagged within this diagram (ho ho)

Nigel Shadbolt and Wendy Hall both have videos answering the question "What is Web Science?" and Les Carr has a slide share titled What is Web Science

Taking the everyday approach

I intend in subsequent posts to take a more measured academic approach to the definition. Meantime I am working on the sort of approach that I think an everday kind of person might use - search engines plus wikipedia. I am also only presenting generic information in this post. I plan at least two future editions

1. educational/curriculum approach
2. published research and current projects

so if we try to find out what is web science, what are the various versions suggested?

First take simple google searches, using web science, web science definitons, "web science" definitions

I should note that I have been following a google search on Web Science as a search term for some time, and also have been tracking "web science" and "websci" on twitter.

Also if I have already looked at this area in a posting on the 2010 Web Science Curriculum Workshop held in Southampton Last year

Simple Searches

www.fuzzzy.com is a social network which gathered its first members in November 2006. It describes itself as a social network for web science, includes collection of bookmarks, but unfortuantely the last time any were recommended by the editors was late 2010. Inevitably it suffers from spam postings, and simple bookmarking to links which are basically web applications. There are no

it seems to have a strong european input, and its greatest contributor is one Janos Haits from Budapest, Hungary

 

have some interesting visualisations which can be compared to the original sourced from the web science trust

they also have a visualisation tool which is quite interesting

Journals

there are of course folk trying to get into the act by proposing journals - it is worth noting that journal.webscience.org is hosted by the WebScience Trust wiki and is a repository of proceedings from the Web Science conferences and other events which have been nominated by the WebScience Trust.

 

for example

Does not actually seem to be up and running yet, but I guess people are trying to get on the bandwagon.

International Journal of Web Science  (IJWS) ISSN (Online): 1757-8809  -  ISSN (Print): 1757-8795

Time for some publications

Bit of a round up on advice on where to publish and how to publish, seems timely revision, we are never too old to learn!
Also thought this might be useful to friends, colleagues and of course PhD students.
I have a couple of papers in the mix at the moment, and am on a mission to get some decent publications out there while I am on sabbatical at LIRMM in Montpellier, so its in focus for me just now.
Seems that Abby Day (formerly of Lancaster, and now based at the University of Sussex) got herself a bit of a reputation a few years ago advising people who to get published in Journals.  You can get a short version of her advice in a downloadable article titled How to write publishable papers you can see a snapshot below.
Actually a bit more searching located all three parts of her advice via the author pages of  The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives (IEJ).

Day points out that some of the empirical basis for the article's guidance are derived from research which was sponsored by Emerald which looked at the quality indicators of academic journals Day, A. and Peters, J. 1995 Quality indicators in academic publishing', Library Review, vol 45 no 3/4.
Emerald, like many journal publishers has author pages which include a set of writings on the topic of how to get published and disseminate your work.

My post was actually prompted by the fact that pubications are on the top of my todo list just now, and that I came across a (timely) tweet pointing me to a Prezi which claimed to be able to help "


The source of this work is a researcher from Melbourne who tweets as the @thesiswhisperer (great handle isn't it) and who had a blog of the same name and is known in the real world as Inger Mewburn (again a distinctive handle, but perhaps less easily recalled).
The prezi has

• a few links to related work - a post on Publish2PhD
• anatomy of types of papers
• reference to helping Doctoral Students to Write, Kamler and Thompson (writing a tiny text)
• writing a spew draft - links to a post about using scrivener to help in this process ( and had me resolving to take another look at tinderbox)
• writing a scratch outline
• cleaning the mess - clarify your ideas - may be itterative
• murder your darlings (edit and revise)
• leave it to relax/proove/rest (we are talking bread making analogies here) - critical friends too
• this prezi is not too much like 'powerpoint on acid' - others can be. I find myself thinking how long did it take her to create that.....

I think this post might usefully be linked to something I identified last year which was related to a learning technologies roadmap, and also various pieces on places to publish. More of that later...

Refs:
Day, A., 1996, How to get research published in Journals, Gower, Aldershot, UK
Day, A. and Peters, J., 1995 Quality indicators in academic publishing', Library Review, vol 45 no 3/4
Brown S., Black., Day A., Race P., 1998, 500 Tips for getting published: A guide for educators, researchers and Professionals, Kogan Page, London, UK

Mendeley and repositories - pragmatics in a Web World

I tried playing with Mendeley a good few months ago but did not feel I had particularly mastered the mechanics even if I thought I understood the principles.

I was aware that Les Carr had written about Mendeley via twitter, but just as I am preparing for a sabbatical I am rather more focussed on what tools I need to use and master.  I guess in terms of web science this could be seen as "eating your own dog food". The bit of Web Science i find interesting is the emergence, place and role of "social machines" plus the observations of the way in which the technology and engineering of the web respond to social manifestations. Web 2.0 may have been copyrighted, but it was right there in Tim Berners-Lee's conception of the Read Write Web - as with so much of what we recognise in technology today the story is one of incremental distributed development from the bottom up, rather than grand design from the top down.  Although having the odd insight into the possible grand design is proving very useful :-)

In that context I made the following comment on the previous blogs comparing Mendeley and Institutional Repositories which Les authored as Repository Man.
.......

Hmm.. I contrast Mendeley and IRs in a rather different way.

An institutional repository where rich data is collected which enables the dynamic building of a sort of contour map of research (substitute or add other spheres of focus eg educational resources).

For the individual researcher/teacher it generates a useful map of their home territory, but combined with other local researcher's deposits it shows estates, villages, cities. (although such visualisations only exist in my head - and there is something about Korbinky's the map is not the territory in there

I use my IR because it's effectively a cloud server with overheads but it's part of my local infrastructure and I have to/need to/ want to use it a bit.

The contents of Mendeley on my desktop (when I understand what I am doing) is the by product of my personal intellectual endeavours to note, observe, perhaps reflect and create order out of information I have processed as part of some research activity. it's the proxy for those photocopied collections of annotated papers of old. It's quite useful and reassuring if I can use it's tools on different platforms and then aggregate the results of those disjoint bits of effort.

If I am lucky it may help to let me reason and derive or represent understanding.

I use it If there is a low threshold to storing external info via Medeley i might  use it in the hope of getting some extra value from it.

If/ when I master the tool then I can share and compare, perhaps add or contest my understanding if others have gone about using it in the same way as I have, in my particular sphere of interest. My collection becomes an artefact. The sets of collections a set of artefacts for discussion, but perhaps also mathematical analysis and or abstract reasoning.

Of course it might be that my conception of Mendeley has been mediated by my need/compulsion to use my local institutional repository. And the understandings of IRs innate thus gained.

Functionally I think of Mendeley as an alternative and potentially better solution to using a reference manager and some form of half cocked personal electronic 'librarianship'.

I am planning to try to use Mendeley (again) because I plan to share my collections (content and abstract structure) with a few folk I can think of, but don't mind sharing with other folk too if they are interested. But that use will only be sustained if the overheads are low and I master it! If I am pressed and Mendeley is flakey I will stick with the half-cocked methods.

I am not an evangelist of open sharing but I do have it as an objective which I would like to work - that may be about personal politics as much as being part of my academic identity.

That same view prevents me being antagonistic to my IR even if I sometimes find it frustrating. I guess that with my IR, overheads and mastery within my control , so I knuckle down and use it.

213.251.145.96

wikileaks has caused a bit of a furore
you can look up what they are saying by going to 213.251.145.96
or by checking out the various papers who have been granted access to the files prior to the leaking

in some ways this seems to be following the protocol which the telegraph used to reveal info about MPs expenses in the summer of 2009

sclater: RT @learninganorak: Julian Assange: Readers' Choice for TIME's Person of the Year 2010 http://t.co/1YT8EB6 via @TIMENewsFeed
Original Tweet: http://api.twitter.com/1/sclater/status/14731574712999936

November 2010 CETIS2010 - notes

draft notes

CETIS 2010 Nottingham, November 15-16 2010

The annual CETIS conference is another example of ways in which JISC has agency to support and enrich communities of practice operating in the field of technology enhanced learning in the UK.

It's a few years since I last attended this conference; the community seems to have established a strong sense of identity since that time. Given the title of the conference "Never Waste a Good Crisis - Innovation & Technology in Institutions" and the financial onslaught on Higher Education lets hope that this strength stands it in good stead for the next few years.

You can find the Programme online which will give you links and a sense of the dominant agendas.

As with many conference the events were launched with a keynote, preceded by some welcoming remarks and a brief trip into a futuristic virtual higher education courtesy of Paul Hollins

Keynote


Anya Kamanetz, author of DIY University Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education
@anya1anya on twitter

twitter visualisation link

Options available parallel session day 1

Open Innovation

Relationship Management in HE and FE

Cheaper, flexible, effective institutions: technology, politics and economics

Integrating and Subverting Corporate Systems for Educational Purposes

Next Generation Content

My account will focus on Relationship Management . The session included presentations (contact Sharon Perry s.perry@bolton.ac.uk); a practical scenario based exercise led by Dr Qin Han; and an account of experiences from the Derbi project at the University of Derby presented by Jean Mutton

Service Design references and Webliography

taguclan a sort of rough guide to the University. Developed to help prospective students learn about the university, compiled by existing students, an example of collaborative authoring/co-production.

twitter tag #rminhe
JISC CETIS relationship managment website

Those of you wanting to find out a bit more of the background to service design, may find the wikipedia entry on service design reasonably informative

CETIS report on service design - from University of Derby

Running notes on the presentation:

These sessions arose from JISC funded projects looking at Customer Relationship Management and Student Life-cycle Relationship Management

It can be seen as an example of applying commercial techniques to a higher education context. There already existing examples of the application of commercial techniques to public sector experiences - for example in the health service

Example from Goldsmiths - spotting the pinch points - debugging processes. In their case it was found that small changes to service delivery can make much larger impacts across the piece.

The initial thrust of the session was thinking about how we might use customer relationship management tools in an educational context. This actually applies to the frameworks for thinking and analysing how we optimise processes and deal with problems which are associated with the labrynthine procedures around the student experience.

During the disucssion it was observed that issues do arise surrounding the conceptions of what Universities are about, terms like customer implies/belies the comoditisation of education. It was observed that there was less resistance with the use of the word client. Engaging in these sorts of processes may help a university articulate its values and crystalise what it expects to emerge as the outcomes of its processes and to thereby identify intended and unintended outcomes of processes.


Part 2 - interactive session on Service Design

principles underpinning the service design approach

Part 3 - the DERBI experience

Jean Mutton introduced an account of the experience of the DERBI project at the University of Derby which introduced service design at the University of Derby, The small scale project led to an interesting set of improvements for the student experience in relation the their experience of the enrollment processes. myderbi @ myderbi on twitter

it seems to me that if we are talking about learning from business processes we might look to good experiences of the online interaction, and then see how we can incorporate such practices or model the interactions into our processes.

Perspectives/Issues Discussed

fail points

heuristics for management
spotting the fail points

some discussion

biographies


Qin Han studied service design and communities of service for her PhD research

Sharon Perry is one of the CETIS team

Jean Mutton is the Student Experience Project Manager - DERBI Project - University of Derby

Day 2

Enterprise Data - Wilbert Kram
Linked Enterprise Data in F/HE organisations stuff

Damian Steer from the ILRT explaining how they make use of linked data in Bristol.

http://researchrevealed.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/

Paul Miller, Cloud of Data - Making Data Work account of a few up and running semantic web applications


Particularly like the fact that he explained how Tripit works, and what its advantages are. Something I have been trying to say to Hugh for a bit of a while!

SIRI - iphone app - only available in the states at the moment. Came out of a Darpa project -> apple

PowerSet -> ms, bing

Trueknowledge (UK) 200m

Freebase - metaweb google

Tripit not bought yet


canonical source of community enriched data

Seån O'Riain DERI NUI Galway

Enterprise Linked Data - overview of the current deployment and extent of community

ref - open society foundation open data study

The report , commissioned by Open Society Institute’s Transparency and Accountability Initiative and written by Becky Hogge, provided insights on the UK and US processes to unlocking their data to their respective data.gov’s.

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/focus/communication/articles_publications/publications/open-data-study-20100519

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becky_Hogge

Tim Berners-Lee's five star scheme

http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/


http://nlp.hivefire.com/articles/18041/the-role-of-community-driven-data-curation-for-ent/
The Role of Community-Driven Data Curation for Enterprises
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n057n28561m86vl6/


Ref to challenges for financial data integration Edward Curry, Andreas Harth, Sean O'Riain Challenges Ahead for Converging Financial Data. In W3C Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web

http://sw.deri.org/2009/09/financial-data/

ref http://www/w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/

Feedback in Plenary: links and notes
take a look

Disruptive Innovation http://tinyurl.com/disruptive2010

Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation
Wesley M. Cohen, Daniel A. Levinthal; Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 35, 1990

http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charlesw/s591/Bocconi-Duke/Papers/C10/CohenLevinthalASQ.pdf


Designing Learning, towards a scalable interdisciplinary design science of learning

ref - transforming american education - learning powered by technology


Wang and Hannafin Design Based Research 1995

socio-cognitive engineering: a methodology for the design of human-centred technology European Journal of Operational Research

Socio-cognitive engineering: A methodology for the design of human-centred technology M. Sharples N. Jeffery, J. B. H. du Boulay, D. Teather, B. Teather and G. H. du Boulay

Copyright - fair use for the UK?

from the bbc news site http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11689463

reporting on a planned speech today (4/05/10)

"The second new announcement I can make today is to do with intellectual property. The founders of Google have said they could never have started their company in Britain.

"The service they provide depends on taking a snapshot of all the content on the internet at any one time and they feel our copyright system is not as friendly to this sort of innovation as it is in the United States.

"Over there, they have what are called 'fair-use' provisions, which some people believe gives companies more breathing space to create new products and services.

"So I can announce today that we are reviewing our IP laws, to see if we can make them fit for the internet age. I want to encourage the sort of creative innovation that exists in America."

Mr Cameron will promise to work to ensure London's East End becomes a "world-leading technology city to rival Silicon Valley" in California.

He will announce that Google, Facebook and Intel are among the firms investing in the area.

Notes: Semantic technologies in Higher Education - revisited

Notes - We hosted a workshop at Southampton this week which revisited the agendas for Semantic Technologies in Higher Education

There are many different perspectives on semantic technologies - the folks assembled represented the spectrum including

• hardline technologists who want to build and implement systems (and who are well aware that they need to talk to users)
• post grads exploring semantic technologies (novel applications and uses)
• academics looking at how semantic technologies might impact on university eco-systems

Presentations - like all the info relating to this workshop details can be found at http://www.semhe.org/

Hugh Glaser - a retired ECS academic who is now Chief Architect with Seme4 made a presentation titled "Pragmatics of Semantic Technologies in Education: Linked Data" http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21666/

included a demo of RKB explorer as a device to explore how RDF can be used, and what problems need to be resolved when considering distributed sources of linked data

CRS - co reference service find URIs->store->publish->recommend a canon

Dave Lambert - video annotation tools

the paper http://www.semhe.org/2010/files/semhe10_lambert-yu.pdf
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/dave-lambert

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/hong-qing-yu

Hugh Davis and Chris Gutteridge


context and background from Hugh, previous research, current activities and ambitions for the university
Chris Gutteridge - account of experience, pragmatics

mentioned lots of stuff including...

From Chris Gutteridge thoughts about modelling

http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/2010/09/02/the-modeler/


areas

references/Webliography

Seme4 - http://www.seme4.com/

sameas.org

http://www.rkbexplorer.com/

http://sindice.com

lod http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

http://www.geonames.org/

http://id.loc.gov/

http://dewey.info/

http://data.open.ac.uk/

http://www.zemanta.com/

The Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data briefing paper

Date: 01 Jul 10 A briefing paper by Lorna M. Campbell and Sheila MacNeill introducing the concepts of the Semantic Web, Semantic Technologies, Linked and Open Data.
Semantic Technologies