Bengaluru gets India's first observatory to study how internet impacts society

BENGALURU: With the Internet increasingly influencing almost all aspects of life and society across the world, researchers from different disciplines have come together to set up web observatories in different countries to study how the web impacts life. India's first such web observatory was opened at the International Institute of Information Technology in Bengaluru last month.

"The idea is to have web observatories all over the world so that we can create a bank of evidence to support evidence-based policy making, trends of future and so on," said Wendy Hall who co-founded the Web Science Trust in 2006.

Web science, an interdisciplinary field, looks at large systems like the World Wide Web, and the challenges and opportunities it brings to different stakeholders including governments, business, media, academics and individuals. With over a sixth of the world's population and millions of users on social media, the Indian observatory will play a key role in web science research.

"There are over a billion people in India and it will be fascinating to see how the web is shaping governments, businesses and social interactions," Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, England, told ET.

As the Internet and social media become entrenched in the society, it has become critical to study its impact on issues such as security, commerce, criminality and privacy and help decide how best to respond to them. Srinath Srinivasa, head of web sciences laboratory at IIIT-Bangalore, said, "Web science helps us understand how the web is shaping us and how we are shaping the web."

The observatory will soak in data from various sources, store it and provide open access and tools to analyse that data. Several internet pioneers including Tim BernersLee, known as the inventor of the Internet, are part of the Web Science Trust that's driving this initiative. The trust plans to set up 20 such observatories across the world. The one in Bengaluru is the sixth.

These observatories will help researchers gather and process evidence to support policy making, predict trends and increase our knowledge of how the web is changing the society.