Web Observatory and Discovery Informatics workshop. Microsoft, Redmond, 18 July 2012

1. Web Observatories
David De Roure

2. For the Benefit of Humanity

3. An observatory is sociotechnical
Technical Social
• Multiple observatories • Researchers
• Datasets and dataflows • Managers
• Analytics • Shared artefacts
• Tools and software (intermediate
• Automation results, annotation)
• Notification (real time) • Shared methods
• Provenance • Collaborative analysis
• Secure • Policy
• Linkable • Responsible innovation
• Programmatic access • Training
• Visualisation (eyepiece?) • Standards!

4. Anatomy of an observatory
Install
Query Subscribe
analytic
ongoing collection

5. Web Observatory Community Group
• Articulating the business and technical requirements
for the Web Observatory
• Need all observatory stakeholders, and links to other
W3C activities
• Starting by identifying existing observatories, current
practice and use cases
• Preliminary discussions: need to describe
observatories, datasets, data flows, policies, and to
share results and methods
• Announced at WWW, WEBIST and WebSci 2012
• http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/

7. WSTNet workshop at Web Science 2012
• Scoped as (virtual) Web Science Observatory
• Web as an artefact (data about Web vs on)
• What are the questions that a Web Scientist wants to ask
of the observatory? In 2020?
• Reproducible/Reconstructable/Responsible Research
• Feedback loop – astronomy is special case (locations of
stars not socially constituted…)
• Start with tractable project (e.g. twitterology, timeline)
• Incentives to deposit?
• Closed vs open, disclosure risk
• Observatory management, policy and legal agreements
part of value-add

8. Next Steps for W3C Community Group
• Events: Microsoft Faculty Summit workshop, Digital
Research 2012 (10th September, Oxford)
• Encouraging you to sign up 
• Setting up regular meeting time
• Introductions, check for stakeholder coverage
• Interlinking with other W3C activities
• “Observing the observatories” – exemplars, scope
• Emerging use cases…

9. Datascopes telescopes for the naked mind
NRAO/AUI/NSF
From Signal to Understanding

10. 1. Web as lens
2. Web as artefact

11. david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
blogs.nature.com/eresearch
@dder
http://webscience.org/
http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/
http://www.digitalsocialresearch.net/