L3S Research Areas

The image above depicts the areas and topics in Web science that are covered by L3S. The Web of people is the heart of our research efforts: The complex ecosystem that is the World Wide Web is evolving, primarily due to the interaction between technology and users, and it must be examined in this overall context as well. The basic topics of interest in this field are communication and networking between users via the Web, provision of a wide range of content on the Web, and personalization of communication and information infrastructures for individual users and groups of users. Web information management and Web search functions play a crucial role when it comes to access to information on the Web. This applies to both digital libraries and the deep Web, and also the access to all kinds of text-based, semi-structured multimedia information on the Web. Appropriate Middleware for Web infrastructures, building on distributed services and corresponding functionalities for guaranteeing data security on the Web, is another area of focus in our research, as is conceptualization of the Future Internet, which will be able to adjust flexibly to the ever-changing requirements imposed by the Web applications that take the Internet as their basis. In October 2011 the interdisciplinary field of Web Governance (no fig.!) completes the research core areas of L3S. Issues of legal and political governance in areas such as access, data protection, and privacy, along with economics aspect of the Web are the main topics of  it's focus. Last but not least, the L3S Research Center engages in important fundamental research in the context of web science, including in the fields of information retrieval, the Semantic Web, and data mining. The sections that follow provide an overview of the topics the Center is examining in the context of these research areas.