Bangalore, February 17 2015: The  International Institute of Information Technology, here  has joined some 15 universities world-wide, to create a Web Observatory  on their campuses. 
Like physical and astronomical  observatories that gaze at the heavens, these web observatories  will  create a global network to locate and describe existing data sets owned by public and private organizations,  gather new global data sets and identify analytical tools to analyze and visualize data sets across borders. 
The IIIT-B observatory  will join in this international effort to unify open data, big data and eResearch data, that is being facilitated by the Web Science Trust (a global non-profit institution with a secretariat at the University of Southampton, UK) in partnership with the W3C and the Web  Foundation.
In her keynote at a conference to mark the occasion,  Southampton University's Prof Wendy Hall, said  the Observatory network will hopefully help realize the original 25 year-old vision of World Wide Web "inventor", Tim Berners-Lee. It is also  part of what is being called  Web 3.0  --  the Semantic Data of linked data repositories.
The larger aim?  'Map the Digital Universe'!  The Bangalore Observatory might just be one small step in what could well end up as a giant leap towards seamless  global data sharing.  Besides Prof  Wendy Hall, other participants included UK Prof. Noshir Contractor,  Northwestern University US Prof. David De Roure,  Oxford University, UK , Dr. Ramine Tinati Univ. of Southampton and   Prof. Kirthi Ramamritham IIT-Bombay.