New plan to shape the future of the web

The WSRI will involve the development of new web science undergraduate courses

A new research initiative has been launched that aims to shape the way the web will be used and designed in the future.

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) is a collaboration between Southampton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with founding directors including web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and new British Computer Society (BCS) president Nigel Shadbolt.

It will include joint research projects, workshops and exchanges between the two institutions and will involve the introduction of new web science courses at a masters and undergraduate level in the years to come, explained Southampton University's professor of computer science, Wendy Hall.

"We will be building cohorts of PhD students – we need researchers who understand multidisciplinary ways of researching," she added. "We really want people in the world to start calling themselves web scientists."

Researchers will work on issues such as information access and how to effectively reflect social and legal rules in the web, and the WSRI is also engaging with private industry for help with funding.

Possible projects include developing interfaces for the semantic web, and any technology thatarises from these research projects will be open-sourced to make it "available as widely as possible", according to WSRI founding director and MIT principal research scientist Daniel Weitzner.

"We have a duty to understand the web because although it produces wonderful things, it can also produce terrible things too," added Berners-Lee. "The web is pretty simple and we need to think carefully about what sort of things we introduce."

In separate news internet oversight body Icann has announced the roadmap for the introduction of full Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), with final tests and standards and rules discussions by Icann committees and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) expected to be completed by the end of 2007.

Second-level domains, or all the characters in the main body of an url, have already been internationalised, and Icann's work is now focused on ensuring the "stuff to the right of the dot", for example .com or .cn, can also be expressed in non-Roman alphabets, according to Icann executive officer Paul Levins.

"There's been a lot of deliberation in the planning and consultation to get to where we are now," he explained. "People want to express .com or the appropriate domain in their relevant alphabet because if they can't physically write the entire name in their own language it may be ignored by people."

Emily Taylor of .uk registry Nominet said the issue of IDNs was discussed at great length at the recent UN Internet Governance Forum in Athens. Progress to fully internationalised domain names is important because "they are a symbol for many of the American-centric Domain Name System", she added.