The three 'W' of the World Wide Web call for the three 'M' of a Massively Multidisciplinary Methodology

Description

This position paper defends the idea that the development of the Web to its full potential requires addressing the challenge of massive multidisciplinarity. It was triggered by the topic of a joint panel at the conferences CLOSER and WEBIST 2014.The topic of the panel was: " social, political and economic implications of the cloud and the Web ". I focused on the Web and the position that I defended during the panel, and that I report here, is that, while implications of the Web can be identified in social, political and economic domains, the global challenge raised by the Web is the need for massive multidisciplinarity to lead it to its full potential that goes beyond any individual prediction. This article starts with three sections respectively confirming the social, political and economic impacts of the Web. The fourth section shows that in fact many other domains are impacted and the fifth section proposes that this spreading is in fact due to several existential characteristic of the Web. The sixth section concludes insisting on the importance of preserving this open nature of the Web, of assisting it and of addressing the challenge of a massive multidisciplinary approach for developing the Web.

Abstract

International audience

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