Web science is a relatively young interdisciplinary branch of research focused on the entirety of socio-technical context in the web. New technologies such as semantic web, linked open data (LOD) and social web play an important role. These facilitate machine interpretation and linking of information and data as well as networking and cooperation across the web thereby offering a significant increase in quality of the web from a user perspective.

In the areas of Web Science and Web Technologies, GESIS research activities are focused on analysis, design and development of science technologies and applications that make the web better and more useable for social science applications, open new communication channels for the social science community and deliver new possibilities for linking research data across the web.

Currently this research field is focused on the publishing of GESIS data as Linked Data, the automatic linking of varied types of information (publications, projects, research data) with the help of semantic technologies and the coupling of social science portals with external Web 2.0 platforms.