WebSci09

The Web Science Research Initiative recently announced their first web science conference:

We welcome papers from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including computer science, physics, economics, political science, sociology, geography, management, health. Papers which incorporate more than one discipline will be particularly welcomed. We have identified the following areas of on-line society and Web development for particular attention:

• E-commerce
• Government and Political Life
• Social Relationships
• Cybercrime and/or the Prevention Thereof
• Health
• Culture On-Line
• E-Learning

In addition, we are interested in papers that concern the cross-cutting infrastructure issues on which these areas depend including, but not limited to:

• Linked Data and the Semantic Web
• Trust and Reputation
• Security and Privacy
• Networking (Social and Technical)

This sounds like a broad spectrum of potentially very interesting topics. It seems like there is quite a bit of innovation and development happening around some of these topics, particularly among small tech startups as well as the bigger social net firms.

It’ll be fun to see what kind of research will be presented there.