The Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is a multidisciplinary research institution that focuses on the study of theories, methods, and applications of the World Wide Web within three inter-connected themes or “Constellations”: Future Web, Semantic Foundations and Xinformatics. TWC is led by Professor James Hendler, Professor Deborah McGuinness, and Professor Strzalkowski. It is also supported by faculty members, research scientists, administrative staff, and postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students. Together, these individuals explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web and develop new technologies and languages to ultimately expand the Web’s capabilities, all with the common goal of supporting the fundamental social values of trustworthiness, personal control over information, and respect for social boundaries.
Specific topics of research within TWC include but are not limited to:
- Semantic Web technology
- Knowledge provenance and explanation
- Privacy, policy, and workflow transparency
- Tetherless and mobile Web access
- Trust, Social networking and collaboration technologies for the Web
- Network-centric concepts for the defense, industrial and intelligence sectors
- Cyber-infrastructure in general with initial focus on eScience cyberinfrastructure
- Ontology generation, evolution, management, and use in diverse disciplines
- Ethical, Policy, and Social aspects of Web use and usability
- Semantic Data Analytics for Healthcare and Life Science
- Semantic Infrastructures for Exposure to Science and Health
- Scalable, Provenance-Aware Knowledge Infrastructures with current focus on nano polymers and metamaterials
- Network analyses of mineralogical, fossil, and protein systems over Earth’s history
- Advanced analytics for additive manufacturing systems and accommodating dark data resources.
- Materials Processing Ontology for additive manufacturing
- Discovery of Earth system phenomena and generation of rule-based visualization candidates
- Collaborative notebooks (Jupyter) for data science and Earth interior modeling
- Data Science, Data Quality, Uncertainty and Bias, Data Platforms
- Learning Analytics
- Web Science
- Conceptual and Curriculum Machine Learning Guided by Human Training
- Computable Policy Frameworks
The TWC is organized under the Office of the Provost at RPI and is part of the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Application. It also includes the Web Science Research Center, one of the ten founding international laboratories within the Web Science Trust Network.