Understanding Information and Computation: From Einstein to Web Science

The World Wide Web is the largest sociotechnical system humankind has ever seen; it has changed the way we interact, learn and innovate. Almost daily it appears to change, improve and increase its hold on us.We are, though, seeing underlying stability emerge. The way Web sites rank in popularity, for example, appears to follow familiar laws. These are not laws solely constrained to computer science or information technology, however, but are also seen in fundamental disciplines like biology, physics and mathematics. The Web, synthetic at its surface, seems to be quite 'natural' deeper down, and one of the driving aims of Web Science is to discover how far down such ‘naturalness’ goes. If the central properties of the Web are more elemental than first thought, we might have to question things like the very nature of information. Understanding Information and Computation is about such questions and some mind-blowing answers.

About the Author

Dr Philip Tetlow, CEng, FIET is a Certified IT Architect, Web Scientist and one time W3C member. He is a Senior Certified Executive IT Architect and member of the Technical Consultancy Group in IBM’s Global Business Services division. Dr Tetlow has many years’ experience of delivering large complex IT systems and has specialised in Web related architectures for nearly a decade. He has presented on Web Science at the Royal Society, London, and is a Visiting Fellow at the University of York, UK. Dr Tetlow is the author of the 2007 book The Web's Awake, which was arguably the first ever book on what is now known as web science.