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This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

Built on top of Calais and scalably hosted on Amazon's EC2 service, the new site at SemanticProxy.com enters public beta today, and enables anyone to easily generate rich semantic metadata for pages on the open web, simply by passing the URL to SemanticProxy.

Panda, an open source project, will let any site owner willing to do a little coding and integration work to allow user video uploads and playback. Think YouTube in a box. The software itself is free and will run on Amazon Web Services EC2, S3 and SimpleDB. You'll have to pay for the Amazon services, but this is a nice step forward from a variety of existing paid services out there like Zencoder, SesameVault and Hey!Watch. Panda handles all aspects of uploading, transcoding and streaming, handing things off to a Flash player like JW FLV Player by default.

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Intelligent Support for Exploratory Environments held in conjunction with the EC-TEL'08 Conference Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17th, 2008.

So far, most investments in EI have been driven by a focus on an increase in efficiency and topdown change of business processes in relatively static value chains. Typical deployment of EI has been based on the idea of an enterprise-wide "big bang" transition to a new "best way of working", pre-conceived largely by a corporate elite of engineers and analysts. The resulting system and the related procedures were supposed to enforce this way of working and make sure that the enterprise would reap the benefits (of efficiency) for some time to come, by discouraging subsequent unofficial forms of smaller-scale and/or bottom-up change. This approach was very much enterprise centric and typically weak in accommodating subsequent change. It is however no longer adequate, because enterprises increasingly need to rely on bottom-up initiative, emergence and flexibility, in order to remain competitive. Due to fierce global competition, enterprises can no longer survive with a focus on efficiency and producing more of the same (for a lower price). Instead, enterprises need to concentrate on value innovation and producing more of not the same (with higher margins). To this end enterprises operate increasingly in dynamic value networks.Therefore EI should be geared towards leveraging creativity, collaboration and change in more dynamic networks to release its full potential as an instrument for value creation. A new objective for EI should be: To stimulate value creation based on innovation and co-creation in a context of networked enterprises that is very much defined bottom-up, by creative, committed workers.