It is now almost two decades since the Web has been invented. Initially motivated by the need to exchange documents between computer systems, the Web evolved rapidly, 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 or OpenStreetMap. In recent years, people and organizations began to adopt these architectural principles for publishing data on the Web, resulting in efforts such as Open Government Data or Linked Data.

This course will examine technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web, discuss the social and policy context from which they arose, show the practical applications of such systems, and go into cross-cutting issues in this context. Course work involves lectures and readings, and weekly homework assignments. In addition, there will be a semester-long project in which the students should demonstrate their expertise in building data-centric Web information systems.

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