Web Science Information

Background information

Web science: a provocative invitation to computer science, B. Shneiderman, Communications of the ACM 50 25--27 (2007): here

SL/HL Core - 30 hours

C1 Creating the web (8 hours)

Web terminologies, protocols, types of web page (static and dynamic), practical activities linked to the development of different types of web page

Link	Description	Other comments
link	Hobbes Internet timeline	Information about the history and growth of the Internet,. A lot of superfluous material, but a good starting point
link	How will Web 3.0 work?	One vision of the future

C2 Searching the web (6 hours)

Search engines, web crawlers, page ranking mechanisms, search engine optimisation

Link	Description	Other comments
link	Information about the surface web	Content on answers.com
link	Information about the deep web	Content on answers.com
link	The invisible web
link	What Is the 'Invisible Web'?	90% of all pages are not locatable by search engines
link	Search engines and Spam	Part of a research paper from Stanford University
link	Page rank explained by linksand law.com	There is a large amount of information related to the calculations that are beyond the scope of the course
link	Google's PageRank Explained
link	Search engine optimisation tips
link	Whitehatworks.com	An opinion of how the Google Page Rank algorithm has been recalculated fro 2010-11
link	Search engines, crawlers and pagerank	The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
link	Video - How search works	Google Video on Search engines - good starting point
Link	Google - how search works	Google's description of how search works
Link	Infographic from Google on Search	How Search works Infographic

C3 Distributed approaches to the web (6 hours)

Computing methods such as Grid, Ubiquitous, P2P, Mobile. Open standards. Compression techniques.

Link	Description	Other comments
link	What is Grid Computing?	An outline of Grid Computing
link	What is Ubiquitous Computing	An introduction to Ubiquitous Computing (needs a better example)

C4 The evolving web (10 hours)

Evolution of the web, cloud computing, copyright / IP, democratisation of the web?

Link	Description	Other comments
link	Democratisation of the web	Has Web 2.0 led to an inequality in participation? - link to power laws
link	The Web as a driver of democracy	Article by Eric Schmidt
link	How Web 2.0 Works	People can determine the content and appearance of the wb
link	Types of cloud computing	A discussion of public and private cloud computing
link	Ethernet switches won't support the cloud	5 reasons why the traditional network may not migrate to being a cloud based one

HL extension - 15 hours

C5 Analysing the web (5 hours)

Web graphs
Note that these articles are for a level beyond the requirements of this topic, so teachers should look at the assessment statements in the Guide, the depth of coverage in the Specimen Paper and the time allocated for the teaching of the topic.
There is no need to study the mathematical equations in the algorithms.
An understanding of the bowtie structure of the web and the link to power laws is also required.

Link	Description	Other comments
webgraph lecture notes.pdf Details Download 887 KB	Lecture notes used by Les Carr (Southampton University)	Reproduced with permission of the author
Web as a graph.pdf Details Download 164 KB	The Web as a graph	Information on the bowtie structure
Overview	powerpoint presentation - theory of web graphs, edges and vertices, bowtie structure, deep web, power laws
article or PDF: Here	Graph structure of the web as a bowtie including information on the strongly connected components (SCC), relevance of power laws by Andrei Broder1, Ravi Kumar2, Farzin Maghoul1, Prabhakar Raghavan2, Sridhar Rajagopalan2, Raymie Stata3, Andrew Tomkins2, Janet Wiener3.	As 1: AltaVista Company, San Mateo, CA.2: IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA.3: Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA.
link	Graph Theory and the web map
link	Google's PageRank Explained
link	Page rank explained by linksand law.com	There is a large amount of information related to the calculations that are beyond the scope of the course

C6 The intelligent web (10 hours)

The Semantic web, ontologies and folksonomies, ambient and collective intelligence.

Link	Description	Other comments
link	Web Science	An article written by Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Professor Dame Wendy Hall FRS, Professor James Hendler and Professor William Dutton
link	Collective Intelligence	Article from MIT based on harnessing collective intelligence to research climate change
link	Definitions of Collective Information
link	Collective inteliigence	Article based on the work of Thomas W Malone at MIT

Videos and pocasts

Video including details
Tim Berners-Lee @ Web Science Conference 09 Athens \| Part 1
Tim Berners-Lee @ Web Science Conference 09 Athens \| Part 2
Tim Berners-Lee @ Web Science Conference 09 Athens \| Part 3
Tim Berners-Lee @ Web Science Conference 09 Athens \| Part 4

Video including details
Tim Berners-Lee @ Web Science Conference 09 Athens \| Part 1
Tim Berners-Lee @ Web Science Conference 09 Athens \| Part 2
Tim Berners-Lee @ Web Science Conference 09 Athens \| Part 3
Tim Berners-Lee @ Web Science Conference 09 Athens \| Part 4