[Air-l] Web Science belated one-up-personship

[m.thelwall at blueyonder.co.uk]

[Just belatedly realised this] Anyone who was at the AoIR Workshop on Web
Science Research Methods in 2004 http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/AoIRASIST/
can claim to have discussed "Web Science" a full year ahead of Web founder
TBL's attempt to play catch-up with the Web Science Research Initiative
http://www.webscience.org/ ;-) So the AoIR got there first with the name
as well as the idea for organised interdisciplinary Web research!

But seriously, I think that the Web science initiative has the objective
of harnessing interdisciplinary research for computer science goals - more
specifically for building/engineering the Web as an effective information
system (quoting from the article below: "the science of decentralised
information systems"), whereas we are more interested in studying its use.
So maybe there isn't really much of an overlap in the *core goals* of the
AoIR and the WSRI after all, although anything TBL does is interesting.

Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., O'Hara, K., Shadbolt, N., &
Weitzner, D. J. (2006). A framework for Web science. Foundations and
Trends in Web Science, 1(1), 1-130.
http://www.nowpublishers.com/product.aspx?product=WEB&doi=1800000001