Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Human-Centered Web Science

In the last five years, service orientation and social computing have radically changed the nature of the World Wide Web. With today’s Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), no strict division of labor should or can exist between the tasks for which software services are responsible and those that are delegated to people. Rather, human actors and software process engines cooperate closely to enact business processes at a previously unheard-of scale and complexity level. In turn, large scale social interaction on the Web has fostered the generation of an enormous amount of User-Generated Content (UCG), whose semantics and pragmatics tend to gradually emerge as the result of large-scale human iteration rather than be conceived a priori by normative design. Large-scale cooperation, however, has introduced new weaknesses; in interorganizational distributed environments, software services and process engines can be even more brittle than their predecessors, mainframes and leased line transfers. Also, careless adoption of social computing can expose organizations to unexpected loss of performance, due to lack of integration between activities delegated to humans and tasks performed via IT-based processes and services. The Human-System Interaction (HSI) research community has been working on this issue since the early days of the Web: in the last few years, however, the importance of the human factor in shaping Web data semantics and defining the usage of Web application has come to the attention of a much wider, interdisciplinary group of researchers under the new perspective of Web Science introduced by, among others, Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall and Jim Hendler. World Wide Web (2010) 13:1–2 DOI 10.1007/s11280-009-0082-4