1–16 of 16
User typesFrequency of useVariety of useTypical activityTypical platformStudiesOther labels (1) Non-users No use No use No All Largest of all user types Non-Internet users, Off the net, Inactives, Non-users, Non-users, Anxiety, (2) Sporadics Low use Low variety No particular activity, low interest, newcomers All Found…
The Internet relies on our greed for knowledge and connections, but also on our astonishing online generosity. We show inordinate levels of altruism on the Internet, wasting hours on chat room sites giving advice to complete strangers, or contributing anonymously to Wikipedia just to enrich other people’s knowledge…
Asymmetric attention is the key to another important concept, celebrity. Being famous means that a lot of people pay attention to you--after all, by definition it is famous people who appear on the cover of magazines, which are purchased because lots of people want to know what's happening with their favorite…
A final point briefly worth making is that the Web is a space designed to let information flow, and to create opportunities for cooperation and collaboration. It is worth asking why freer information flow is a good thing, and the answers are pretty straightforward. It is good to have the freedom to express oneself in…
NLP works well statistically; the SW, in contrast, requires logic and doesn't yet make substantial use of statistics. Natural language is democratic, as expressed in the slogan 'meaning is use' (see Section 5.1 for more discussion of this). The equivalent in the SW of the words of natural language are logical terms…
It is argued - though currently the arguments are filtering only slowly into the academic literature - that folksonomies are preferable to the use of controlled, centralised ontologies [e.g. 259]. Annotating Web pages using controlled vocabularies will improve the chances of one's page turning up on the 'right' Web…
Time-stamping is of interest because the temporal element of context is essential for understanding a text (to take an obvious example, when reading a paper on global geopolitics in 2006 it is essential to know whether it was written before or after 11th September, 2001). Furthermore, some information has a 'sell-by…
Another key factor in assessing the trustworthiness of a document is the reliability or otherwise of the claims expressed within it; metadata about provenance will no doubt help in such judgements but need not necessarily resolve them. Representing confidence in reliability has always been difficult in epistemic…
Nevertheless, the next generation Web should not be based on the false assumption that text is predominant and keyword-based search will be adequate for all reasonable purposes [127]. Indeed, the issues relating to navigation through multimedia repositories such as video archives and through theWeb are not unrelated…
Web topology contains more complexity than simple linear chains. In this section, we will discuss attempts to measure the global structure of the Web, and how individual webpages fit into that context. Are there interesting representations that define or suggest important properties? For example, might it be possible…
Global metrics look at extracting information about the graph as a whole. Compactness is a measure of how connected the graph is; a compact graph means that, in general, it is easy to reach a randomlychosen node from another. The usual measure has a range between 0 (totally disconnected nodes) and 1 (universal…
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query). One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA…
One view is reminiscent of the philosophical idea of supervenience [168, 169]). One discourse or set of expressions A supervenes on another set B when a change in A entails a change in B but not vice versa. So, on a supervenience theory of the mind/brain, any change in mental state entails some change in brain state…
There are many different types of reasoning, but not too many have been successfully automated beyond deductive linear reasoning and various statistical methods. What alternative methods has the Web facilitated? One obvious candidate is associative reasoning, where reasoning on the basis of associations - which can be…
There are two important epistemological questions for Web Science. The first is what properties will future platforms need to have in order to allow as much information as possible to gravitate to the Web without imposing structure or governing theories upon it? One aim of the Web is to facilitate rational discussion…
The most famous quality measure is PageRank [221], discussed earlier, which builds on the intuition that a page which is cited by many other pages is likely to be of significant quality. The insight of PageRank is that the obvious way to subvert that model is to set up a load of dummy pages to cite the page which one…