Southampton supports the creation of India’s first Web Observatory

India’s first Web Observatory has been launched by Professor Dame Wendy Hall of Electronics and Computer Science and by Indian scholar Professor Sowmyanarayanan Sadagopan at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B).

The Web Observatory, set up in partnership with the Web Science Trust, the University of Southampton and other global Web Science laboratories, provides a global, distributed analytics platform that not only provides access to datasets of various sizes but also in helping analyse the web.

Profesor Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University, said:

“I’m really excited about the launch of the Web Observatory in India at IIIT-Bangalore. The web has changed our lives irrevocably and it is so important that we understand how this is happening, so that we can better forecast what might happen in the future. The Web Observatory is crucial to providing the data and data analytics to support evidence based policy making and business intelligence in the future.

"It is also crucial that this is a global effort and it is wonderful to see the development of the Observatory at IIIT-Bangalore as the first step of the evolution of a network of Web Observatories throughout India. Similar Web Observatories exist in European, SE Asia and US universities.”

Further information about the Web Observatory’s launch can be found on the Gov.uk website.