Course: 707.000 Web Science and Web Technology

Graz University of Technology, Summer 2009

Classes: Mondays 12:15 - 13:45, February 2009 - June 2009, Room HS i12 (Inffeldgasse 16b),

https://online.tu-graz.ac.at/tug_online/lv.detail?clvnr=131614,
Markus Strohmaier

Lecture room: ICK1130H (HS i12), Inffeldgasse 16b, 1.Kellergeschoß, 8010 Graz, Austria

Instructor: Dr. Markus Strohmaier
Address: Inffeldgasse 21a/II, Knowledge Management Institute
e-mail: markus.strohmaier at@ tugraz.at

Teaching Assistants (TA): for sending e-mails, please remove spaces in e-mail addresses, replace at@ with @, and start your subject line with [707.000]

Gabriele Zorn-Pauli, gabriele.zorn-pauli at@ student.tugraz.at
Christian Körner, christian.koerner at@ tugraz.at
Daniel Lamprecht, daniel.lamprecht at@ student.tugraz.at
Ingo Holzmann, ingo.holzmann at@ student.tugraz.at

Questions related to this course: Your question might be of interest to other students! Therefore, before sending an e-mail to the instructor or the teaching assistants, please consider posting it to the course newsgroup tu-graz.lv.web-science. The course team reads the newsgroup frequently and will try to answer your question as soon as possible.

Newsgroup: tu-graz.lv.web-science on news.tugraz.at

Students with special needs: If you need accomodation for any type of physical or learning disability, please contact me via e-mail to set up a meeting where we can discuss potential modifications for your participation.

Announcements:

A new version 1.1 of Home Assignment 2 is available online (May 25)
Participate in the KMI Online Marketing Challenge! (Apr 22)
A new version 1.1 of Home Assignment 1.5 is available online (Apr 16)
Please note that registration for this class has closed now, and it is not possible to enroll new students at this point (March 9).
Classes will start on Feb 23rd, 2009. Students are required to enroll via TUGonline (open until March 2).

About the course:

This course aims to provide students with a basic knowledge and understanding about the structure and analysis of selected web phenomena and technologies. Topics include the small world problem, network theory, social network analysis, graph search and technologies/standards/architectures such as JSON, RDF, REST and others.
Course Requirements : Basic java programming skills.

Course work:

Course work will consist of

Home assignments: over the duration of the course, will be graded
1 final exam: at the end of the course, will be graded

Marking scheme:

The following weights will be assigned to home assignments and the final exam (totalling 100%):

Home Assignments I: 30%
Home Assignments II: 20%
Final Exam: 50%

In order to obtain a positive grade, you need to have a total score of 51% or more. There will be no extra exam (no "Nachklausur").

Preliminary course schedule and weekly readings:

Note to students: Changes to this schedule will likely be made. Additional readings may be assigned. Access credentials for protected resources will be handed out in class.

Note to instructors: All teaching materials on this website are available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Austria License, except for referenced material. Powerpoint files are made available on request. Access to protected papers is only available to enrolled students.

Week	Date	Title, Links	Comments and Links
Week 1	23.2.2009	Introduction and Motivation: Web & Science (slides)	In this class, we will discuss the course organization and provide a basic motivation for and introduction to the course. Readings: Web science: a provocative invitation to computer science, B. Shneiderman, Communications of the ACM 50 25--27 (2007) [Web link] Readings: Chapter 1 & 2, A Framework for Web Science, T. Berners-Lee and W. Hall and J. A. Hendler and K. O'Hara and N. Shadbolt and D. J. Weitzner Foundations and Trends® in Web Science 1 (2006) [Web link]
Week 2	2.3.2009	Webtechnologies I (slides, home assignment 1.1)	This class focuses on a selected subset of web technologies that are of interest to the topics of this course. Readings: Chapter 5 "Representational State Transfer (REST)", in "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architecture", Roy Fielding, Dissertation, University of California Irvine, 2000 Optional: Chapter "Representational State Transfer (REST)" in "Pro PHP XML and Web Services", R. Richards 633--672, 2006 [Protected Access]
Week 3	9.3.2009	Network Theory and Terminology (slides, home assignment 1.2)	In this class, we will discuss network theory fundamentals, including concepts such as diameter, distance, clustering coefficient and others. We will also discuss different types of networks, such as scale-free networks, random networks etc. Readings: Graph structure in the Web, A. Broder and R. Kumar and F. Maghoul and P. Raghavan and S. Rajagopalan and R. Stata and A. Tomkins and J. Wiener Computer Networks 33 309--320 (2000) [Web link, Alternative Link] Optional: The Structure and Function of Complex Networks, M.E.J. Newman, SIAM Review 45 167--256 (2003) [Web link]
Week 4	16.3.2009	Social Network Analysis (slides, home assignment 1.3)	What are fundamental entities in social networks and what information is contained in social graphs? We will discuss some selected concepts in social network analysis, such as one- and two mode networks, prestige and centrality, and cliques, clans and clubs. Readings: Web tool predicts election results and stock prices, J. Palmer, New Scientist, 07 February (2008) [Protected Access] Optional: Social Network Analysis, Methods and Applications, S. Wasserman and K. Faust (1994)
Week 5	23.3.2009	Affiliation Networks (slides, home assignment 1.4)	How can we analyze and understand affiliation networks? In this class, we will discuss properties of affiliation networks and we will investigate the use of Galois lattices for the exploration of structural patterns in bi-partite graphs. Optional : L.C. Freeman and D.R. White. Using Galois Lattices to Represent Network Data. Sociological Methodology, (23):127--146, (1993) [Protected Access]
Week 6	30.3.2009	Link Analysis and Search (slides, home assignment 1.5 Update v1.1)	What are ways of searching in graphs? In this class, we will discuss basics of link analysis, including Google's PageRank algorithm as an example. Readings: The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, L. Page and S. Brin and R. Motwani and T. Winograd (1998) [Protected Access]
Week 7	27.4.2009	Online Marketing (Guest Lecture) (slides german)	Guest Lecture: Johannes Oppermann, Google Austria This lecture will give an overview of Google's vision of monetizing search and Google's adsense program.
Week 8	4.5.2009	Network Evolution and Processes (slides)	In this class, we will discuss the nature of network evolution and some selected network processes. We will discuss graph generation algorithms that generate networks with different interesting characteristics. Optional : The Structure and Function of Complex Networks (chapter 8), M.E.J. Newman, SIAM Review 45 167--256 (2003) [Web link] Optional: Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks, A.L. Barabasi and R. Albert, Science 286, 509 (1999) [Protected Access]
Week 9	11.5.2009	The Small World Problem (slides, home assignment 2)	We will discuss several examples and research efforts related to the small world problem and set the ground for our discussion of network theory and social network analysis. Readings: An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem, J. Travers and S. Milgram Sociometry 32 425-443 (1969) [Protected Access] Optional: The Strength of Weak Ties, M.S. Granovetter The American Journal of Sociology 78 1360--1380 (1973) [Protected Access] Optional: Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network, J. Leskovec and E. Horvitz MSR-TR-2006-186. Microsoft Research, June 2007. [Web Link, the most recent and comprehensive study on the subject!]
Week 10	18.5.2009	Metadata, Tagging and Folksonomies (slides)	In this class, we will discuss metadata as well as current phenomena such as tagging and folksonomies. Readings: Ontologies Are Us: A Unified Model of Social Networks and Semantics, P. Mika, International Semantic Web Conference, 522-536, 2005. [Web link] Optional: Folksonomies: power to the people, E. Quintarelli, ISKO Italy-UniMIB Meeting, (2005)
Week 11	25.5.2009	Goal Oriented Analysis of Textual Resources on the Web (slides)	Search engines - such as Google - have been characterized as "Databases of intentions". This class will focus on different aspects of intentionality on the web, including goal mining, goal modeling and goal-oriented search. Readings: M. Strohmaier, M. Lux, M. Granitzer, P. Scheir, S. Liaskos, E. Yu, How Do Users Express Goals on the Web? - An Exploration of Intentional Structures in Web Search, We Know'07 International Workshop on Collaborative Knowledge Management for Web Information Systems in conjunction with WISE'07, Nancy, France, 2007. [Web link] Readings: Automatic identification of user goals in web search, U. Lee and Z. Liu and J. Cho WWW '05: Proceedings of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference 391--400 (2005) [Web link] Optional: M. Strohmaier, P. Prettenhofer, M. Lux, Different Degrees of Explicitness in Intentional Artifacts - Studying User Goals in a Large Search Query Log, CSKGOI'08 International Workshop on Commonsense Knowledge and Goal Oriented Interfaces, in conjunction with IUI'08, Canary Islands, Spain, 2008. (Web link)
Week 12	8.6.2009	Online Marketing II (Guest Lecture) (slides)	Guest Lecture: Susanne Ostertag, Microsoft Advertising, Austria This lecture will give an overview of Microsoft's perspective on monetization on the web. The lecture will focus on the role of gaming and branding in the context of online marketing.
Week 13	15.6.2009	Business Models on the Web (Guest Lecture) (slides)	Guest Lecture: Dr. Peter Scheir, Styria Medien AG This lecture will give an overview of a number of online media projects developed by Styria Medien AG, and will discuss related business models.
Week 14	22.6.2009	Final Exam	No aids allowed. Please also have a look at the newsgroup posting "Regelung Nachklausur" (posted on March 8 2009).

Course policies

Readings should be done before class (except for optional readings).
Assignment descriptions and lecture notes will be made available on the web. It is your responsibility to obtain them. All assignments are due at the beginning of the class on the due date.
Deadlines are sharp. Late submissions will result in a loss of all points for this assignment. Exceptions (such as illness, death of a family member, etc) will only be granted if you contact the TA or me before the deadline.
In your course work, a penalty for citing wikipedia articles as an authoritative reference will apply. This does not mean that you cannot cite wikipedia articles at all, but you need to exhibit traits of reflective and/or critical thinking when refering to them. All students should have a look at the CACM viewpoint article "Why you can't cite Wikipedia in my class" [protected access] and the New Scientist article "Wikipedia 2.0 - now with added trust" [protected access].
Dishonesty (cheating, plagiarism) is a major academic offense and will result in a negative grade / failing the course. What does this mean for home assignments? You are allowed to discuss home assignments with colleagues, but you are not allowed to jointly work on the assignments, copy solutions or share code. What does this mean for the final exams? No aids (no calculators, no cell phones, etc) are allowed except for writing materials (pen). At the final exam, paper will be provided to you.

Further selected course material available online:

Science of the Web, Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, 2009
Six Degrees: The New Science of Networks, Duncan Watts, Columbia University, USA, 2008
Networks and Complexity in Social Systems, Duncan Watts, Columbia University, 2007 (Syllabus)
Networked Life, Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania, USA, 2007 (Syllabus and slides available on the course website)
The Structure of Information Networks, Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University, 2006 (Course outline available on the course website)
Networks, David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University, 2007 (Course outline and handouts available on the course website)
Analysis of Social Media, William Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University, 2007 (Course outline and handouts available on the course website)
Multimedia Information Systems, Matthias Lux, Klagenfurt University, 2007 (Syllabus and slides available on the course website)
Networks, M.A. Boudourides, University of Patras, 2003/2004 (Syllabus and recommended readings available on the course website)
Introduction to Internet Technologies and Web Programming,and Introduction to Network Mathematics, Bruce Hoppe, Boston University, USA, 2007
A Guide to Web Research, Minicourse, Yury Lifshits. Stuttgart, Spring 2007 (Syllabus and slides available on the course website)
Social Web Technologies, Harry Chen, University of Maryland, (Syllabus available on the course website)
also see: An overview of Web Science curricula

Selected Resources:

There is no required text book for this course, however you might find it helpful to have a look at the following resources:

Web links:

A Framework for Web Science, Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, Kieron O'Hara, Nigel Shadbolt, Daniel J. Weitzner, Foundations and Trends in Web Science, Vol 1 Nr 1, 2006
Group of University Researchers to Make Web Science a Field of Study, New York Times, Nov 2, 2006 (An easy-to-read motivation for Web Science - requires free registration with the NYT)

Books:

Six Degrees - The Science of a Connected Age, Duncan J. Watts, 2004
Web Dragons, Ian Witten, Marco Gori, Teresa Numerico, 2007
Evolution and Structure of the Internet: A Statistical Physics Approach, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, Alessandro Vespignani, 2004
Social Network Analysis - Methods and Applications, Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, 1995

Free online books:

Graph Theory, Reinhard Diestel, Electronic Edition, 2005 (free PDF download)
Introduction to Information Retrieval, Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze, Cambridge University Press. 2008. (free PDF download)
Introduction to Social Network Methods, Robert A. Hanneman, and Mark Riddle, University of California, Riverside, 2005 (free online book)

Tutorials:

Graph Structure in Data Mining, KDD 2004 Tutorial, S. Chakrabarti and C. Faloutsos (website incl. slides)

Videos / Lectures:

"The Web: Looking Back, Looking Forward", Tim Berners-Lee (slides, alternative video link)
"Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us", Michael Wesch
Graph Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis, Mary McGlohon, Carnegie Mellon University