Date:   Thursday, March 20, 2014

Time:   4:00 PM – 5:00 PM GMT

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

We’ll record the Webinar and make it available via the WST Web Site and the Vimeo Channel

http://vimeo.com/channels/wstnetwebinars/videos/sort:date/format:detail

Please use the link below to sign up for the Webinar and also make use of the HackPad to add any questions/topics for Dave before/during/after the session.

https://hackpad.com/Web-Observatories-with-Prof-Dave-de-Roure-Gox9Wo2SHxV

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/372549326

This webinar is a joint presentation of the Web Science Trust and the Oxford eResearch Centre (OeRC)

Prof. Dave de Roure is one of the longest associated members of the Web Science Trust and also chairs the W3C community group on Web Observatories.

David De Roure is Professor of e-Research at University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Computing in the Oxford Martin School and has a coordinating role in Digital Humanities at Oxford.

David was closely involved in the UK e-Science programme and held a national role from 2009-2013 as the UK National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research. He is a UK representative on the European e-Infrastructure Reflection Group, one of the UK PIs for the Square Kilometre Array telescope, a chair of the UK e-Science Forum, a partner in the UK Software Sustainability Institute and on the editorial board for IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He is a champion for the Web Science Trust, chairs the W3C Web Observatory Community Group and in 2011 was elected as a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The post WST 2014 Webinar Series – Web Observatories with Prof Dave de Roure appeared first on Web Science MOOC.

In the words of that same lecturer, “To keep pace with the Web’s growing scale and scope, Web Science research demands the development of new theories, the availability and interpretation of relevant data, effective and scalable multilevel analytical methods, and considerable computational infrastructure.”  So the Observatory is an online, mixed-methods, interdisciplinary environment for collaboration and sharing focusing on data about the Web. It provides tools and methodologies to examine data and activity. And to make it more complicated, it’s also a web of observatories, with 15 different Observatories co-ordinated by the Web Science Trust at Southampton.

The type of questions that concern Web Observatories range from inward-looking interrogation, such as what is the taxonomy of a Web Observatory, to outward-facing investigation, such as how can the Web itself be used as a tool to study ‘real world’ events.

One such web methodology is ‘Living Analytics’, based on the analysis of real time interaction between people online. One use of this looks at collaborative filtering – a way of creating personalised recommendations – and suggests that this outperforms matrix factorisation techniques on several dimensions, including accuracy. A little bit more ambitious than sitting around on Facebook, then.

The post What are Web Observatories? appeared first on Web Science MOOC.