Independent review

Exploring the web

John Naughton

November 2, 2006 04:01 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_naughton/2006/11/post_567.html

Interesting story in today's New York Times. It seems that MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain are starting a joint research programme in something called "web science". Tim Berners-Lee, the Oxford-educated physicist who invented the web and is now a professor at MIT, is leading the programme. The Southampton end will be held up by Professors Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt.

Bully for Southampton! So off to their website to see what they are saying about this break into the big league. Er, nothing, nyet, nada, nix. Or, at any rate, nothing as of 2.30pm today. So, following ancient journalistic tradition, I dial Media Relations at Southampton. Am referred on to a very helpful lady in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (RAE rating: 5*, which is as good as you can get in Britain) who explains that there's nothing on the website because the press release hasn't been cleared by MIT and they won't release it until 3pm UK time. This of course hasn't stopped someone at MIT dropping a hint to the New York Times. Otherwise, time-zone differences would have given the Brits the joy of breaking the news.

Ah, poor Southampton (or Soton, as it's known on the net). It's about to learn that entering into a "partnership" with MIT is like marrying into the British royal family. As Ry Cooder might put it, you get to ride in the white Lincoln Continental with the red upholstery, but you must learn always to walk two paces behind your "partner" and never, ever assume that you have any rights to the fawning and adulation that followed upon your elevation. MIT doesn't do partnerships in the normally understood sense of the term; what it does do are pragmatic or strategic liaisons that are deemed to be in its institutional interests. Ask the ancient University of Cambridge, which knows a thing or two about this. Gordon Brown put up £64 million of UK taxpayers' money to lubricate a partnership between Cambridge and MIT. Guess who got the lion's share of the loot?

But I digress. The new initiative is a follow-on from a paper published in the journal Science last August, in which Berners-Lee (who has a full professorship at Southampton to go with his MIT one) and the Soton folks laid out a manifesto for serious research into the structure, dynamics and behaviour of the web. Given how vast and important the web is (40bn pages in the "surface" sector accessible to search engines, 400 to 750 times that in the "deep" web hidden in data silos), there's a real need for some serious academic research that might actually yield some scientific knowledge about the phenomenon, as distinct from the anecdotal and fragmented data we have at the moment. But apart from institutional blessings from both institutions and the enthusiasm of the founding directors, the new Web Science research programme is little more than an intriguing prospectus - Cyberspace's version of an "invisible college". It needs money, staff and graduate students to turn it into something real. I hope they're forthcoming.

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