I just read about tim’s talk in WWW2007 about web science. I do not believe web science is a good thing or a good name, but still it seems quite interesting and important to do more scientific work around the web. It is indeed very true that the web is full of phenomena that you can track measure, simulate etc.. But what are these phenomena essentially? Human activity and I would say there is already a science studying humans, social sciences in the english speaking world. So why the need of a new science, I don’t know except it might be the next thing in the “I want everything on and about the web” phenomenon…
Anyway, this is not what interest me here. Tim presented the process, the scientific process that web science followed and follows. And what a great coincidence, it is graphically so similar to the process we have been developing in Nepomuk and described already in this blog that I can’t resist to look at both here. So here they are:
So here they are, tim’s cycle on the left, cédric’s cycle on the right. Similarities, well they both are cycles (there is always something more to do…next iteration) then they don’t describe exactly the same thing, one interesting thing are the terms “complexity/creativity” which maps in the other diagram to bubbles “usages/abstractions”(well now it’s abstract architecture as the diagram is more engineering oriented, but if you dig in earlier posts, you’ll find “abstractions” emerging from “creation”), so although we use different terminology, these are similar. Difference, well the main one is tim’s cycle goes only one way (forward engineering/inductive methodology) when the other one spins both ways(inductive/deductive , forward engineering/reverse engineering). Anyway, there could be much more said about this, both are great, we are going somewhere.
