This course is over now. Please take a look at the project results.
It is now almost two decades since the Web has been invented. Initially motivated by the need to link documents across computer systems to support large collaborations in high energy physics, the Web evolved rapidly. It has reshaped the notion of information systems, and changed our social interactions and cultural development. Decentralization and openness were fundamental design principles in the Web Architecture and enabled the creation of large, community-driven information spaces such as Wikipedia. In recent years, these principles were adopted for publishing structured data on the Web, resulting in efforts such as Linked Data, schema.org, or the Open Graph protocol.
This course will introduce you to technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web, show the practical applications of such systems, and discuss their design and their social and policy context by examining cross-cutting issues such as citizen science, data journalism and open government. Course work involves lectures and readings as well as weekly homework assignments, and a semester-long project in which the students demonstrate their expertise in building data-centric Web information systems.