Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, has announced an important new initiative to study the evolution of communication and ideas on the World Wide Web.

A joint effort of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology and UK's University of Southhampton, where Berners-Lee is a computer science professor, the proiect seeks to establish a well-defined scientific approach to understanding the impact of networks on human civilization and how to engineer better systems to support human communication and collaboration.

"What we're saying is that it's becoming so important that things like Wikipedia are being created, new business models are emerging and that it's changing our lives so much that we have to have a science to understand this," Berners-Lee told the BBC today.

Especially intriguing is his call for a consilient approach to the study of the Web. Consilience is an old idea resurrected by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson to describe the convergence of the physical and social sciences. (To this day, one of the highlights of my career was an afternoon spent in Wilson's lab at Harvard talking with Professor Wilson and Jim Moore about these ideas).

Berners-Lee says it will be impossible to understand the engineered information environment without integrating sociology, political science, economics and psychology into the analysis. This is something that we've talked about helping to enable since the founding of BuzzLogic, using our analytics not just to describe who has influence but also how ideas are introduced, propigated and embraced by communities.

When asked by the BBC if traditional market research couldn't answer the questions he is raising, Berners-Lee said: "Yes you do have to have market research, but you also have to have sociology and psychology. You also need to understand the underlying technology to make sure for example that the server isn't going to fall over when so many people use it. So all kinds of disciplines are going to have to converge."

Richard MacManus, who was on the conference call announcing the initiative this morning, writes that the focus is "macroscopic network-driven effects of the Web." The New York Times also has a good article about the project and where it is going, which concludes that the key to growing markets online is understanding the dynamics that shape networked conversation.