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Research over two decades at the University of Southampton into the structure and development of the World Wide Web has led to the establishment of a new scientific field, which has earned recognition — and direct funding — from governments and industry around the world. Web Science is the study of the Web as a sociotechnical system. Southampton's work has influenced the Web strategies of the world's biggest companies, including Microsoft, IBM and Google, informed international Web standards and government information policies, led to a network of international laboratories working with industry to advance the Web's development through the provision of highly skilled people taking up specialist roles that draw on their research training.
Kennedy's research advanced knowledge and good practice amongst web designers to enable them to include people with intellectual disabilities (ID) amongst their website audiences and thus improve web accessibility for this user group. The research:
Aston University researchers developed and maintain the Uncertainty Markup Language (UncertML) for quantitative specification and interoperable communication of uncertainty measures in the Web. It is the only complete mechanism for representation of uncertainty in a web context. UncertML has been:
- Used in policy and decision making by UK (Food and Environment Research Agency) and international (European Commission) government agencies, and many research / industrial institutes;
- Presented at industrial /technical workshops, leading to ongoing international collaborations with bodies such as national space agencies (ESA and NASA) and government data providers;
- Accepted as a discussion paper for formal standardisation by the Open Geospatial Consortium;
- Chosen by independent data providers for efficient sharing of complex information and rigorous risk analysis across scientific domains such as pharmacy, global soil mapping and air quality.
Based in the School of English, the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) conducts research in the field of corpus linguistics and develops innovative software tools to allow a wide range of external audiences to locate, annotate and use electronic data more effectively. This case study details work carried out by the RDUES team (Matt Gee, Andrew Kehoe, Antoinette Renouf) in building large-scale corpora of web texts, from which examples of language use have been extracted, analysed, and presented in a form suitable for teaching and research across and beyond HE, including collaboration with commercial partners.
The Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group (SCRG) has developed social science sentiment analysis methods that estimate the strength of positive and negative sentiment in short informal social web text. These methods are encapsulated in the SentiStrength software, which is sold commercially, used commercially to develop socially useful computing applications (e.g., question answering systems, customer relations management systems), used to engage the public in science-related entertaining events, and used for data journalism to inform the public about specific news events. The research includes the development and evaluation of new sentiment analysis techniques that can detect informal expressions of sentiment in social web texts and that can detect the strength of positive and negative sentiment and not just its polarity. The research also includes the development of commercially viable software that includes the sentiment analysis methods.
The research has economic impact by enhancing the performance of commercial software systems, benefitting the owners of these systems (e.g., Yahoo!, Inbenta, Gemius, New Cities Foundation). The research also has economic impact by enhancing the customer relations of companies using sentiment-enhanced customer relations management systems, and with the traffic congestion detection system helping people to get to work on time. It has wide public services impact by helping people to find answers to their questions (via Yahoo! Answers). It has societal impact by supporting newsworthy analyses of social phenomena for the media. It has enhanced cultural life by driving spectacular lightshows during the London Olympics.
Database and URL hijacking is a very real and damaging threat for businesses and their brands. Professor David Duce and Dr Faye Mitchell successfully partnered with Nominet, a leading internet domain registry, to help detect abuse of their WHOIS system and develop tools to better understand and deal with typosquatting. Their approach enabled improvements to Nominet's information services and practices, whilst also influencing the wider technical community. These benefits included better policing of systems, securing brands, reducing fraud and starting to get people thinking about what can be done with data to gain insights and understanding of behaviours.
Open Data has lowered barriers to data access, increased government transparency and delivered significant economic, social and environmental benefits. Southampton research and leadership has led to the UK Public Data Principles, which were enshrined in the UK Government Open Data White Paper, and has led to data.gov.uk, which provides access to 10,000 government datasets. The open datasets are proving means for strong citizen engagement and are delivering economic benefit through the £10 million Open Data Institute. These in turn have placed the UK at the forefront of the global data revolution: the UK experience has informed open data initiatives in the USA, EU and G8.
`Scenes of Provincial Life' exemplifies the practice based research of M. Szpakowski. It was ground breaking in its presentation of "art" video on the world wide web, and involved both conceptual and technical experimentation/research/ development which fed into other activities and outcomes offline, which then fed back into the work itself. The sequence generated offline presentations including 78 screenings of works from the sequence in the period Sept 2009 - Dec 13 at film festivals and galleries on 5 continents, fed into a substantial body of applied work with school students (2 DVDs and a CD ROM, screenings at the BFI and the Shortwave Cinema) and informed Szpakowski's approach as editor in chief, co-curator and writer on the pioneering online curated video resource DVblog (2005 - the present). This research has also fed into writing on short form and online video for the journal MIRAJ and for Furtherfield, the leading UK digital arts platform. It is important to note that, although this document covers the period 2009 -13 the project began in 2002/3, assuming its current format in 2006.
State-of-the-art reasoning systems developed in the UoA have underpinned the standardisation of ontology languages, and play a critical role in numerous applications. For example, HermiT, software developed in the UoA, is being used by Électricité de France (EDF) to provide bespoke energy saving advice to 265,000 customers in France, and a roll out of the use of the system to all of their 17 million customers is planned.
The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS) has computerised geographical surveys of Britain, including Ordnance Survey mapping and all censuses 1801-1971, integrating them into a consistent, innovative geo-spatial and geo-semantic information architecture, and disseminated data via many channels including the UK Data Service, direct work for government agencies (e.g. DEFRA, National Archives), and our own very popular web sites that are used extensively by genealogists and the general public with over 1.8 million unique users per annum. Impact of the technical innovation is mainly on non-UK academics, but within the UK we have made it vastly easier to place modern local issues in long-run perspective — and lots of people and organisations have.