Web Science: An Exploratorium for Understanding and Enabling Social Networks

Abstract

Web Science is well poised to make a quantum intellectual leap by facilitating collaboration that leverages recent advances in: - Theories: Theories about the social motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving and re-creating links in multidimensional networks. Generative mechanisms for emergence of macro-structures. - Data: Developments in Semantic Web/Web 2.0 provide the technological capability to capture, store , merge, and query relational metadata needed to more effectively understand and enable communities. - Methods: An ensemble of qualitative and quantitative methods (exponential random graph modeling (p*) techniques to understand and enable theoretically grounded network recommendations - Computational infrastructure: Cloud computing and petascale applications are critical to face the computational challenges in analyzing the data.