- MSc Admissions

Information and Syllabus

Web Science is a new area of research that analyses the impact of the Web on business, government, law and science itself. Pioneered by ECS in the UK and MIT in the US, Web Science uses multi-disciplinary techniques to explore the impact of the Web on all aspects of human society, from the individual right through to national and global scales.

This new MSc in Web Science is a high-level course that addresses two aspects of the Web: the engineering techniques and technologies that are used to build it and the analytical techniques from economics, psychology, law and sociology that are used to understand how it is changing society.

There is the opportunity to study Web technologies (data and knowledge representations, e-business, agents and information system design) in the context of economic theory, legal practice, linguistic analysis and sociological evaluation.

Since the inception of the web changed the world in the 1990s, there have been two major developments:

Social and collaborative applications, as exemplified by social tagging, media sharing, blogging and wikis.

The semantic web, which adds a level of understanding enabling computers to reason about the information and knowledge on the web.
These recent developments are covered in this MSc through a double unit in Semantic Web Technologies; through the use of web technology in our teaching itself; and by encouraging students to develop their own social and collaborative web sites.

Information for applicants
It is expected that you have taken a first degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Maths, a Social Science or the Humanities. No programming experience is expected for the MSc in Web Science, as it is not aimed at teaching students how to build web sites, applications or services. Instead it is aimed at understanding the Web that others have built, and determining its impact on society. (By contrast, the related MSc Web Technology course does teach you how to build web sites and services and assumes you have programming experience, and are familiar with a modern programming language such as Java or C++ In addition, it is assumed that you are already familiar with HTML, Javascript, and at least one modern web development technology, such as ASP.NET, JSP, or PHP.)

Current Syllabus
The syllabus is updated every year, but this list will give you a guide to modules offered

Reading lists