Tetherless World Constellation

What is TWC?

The Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is a constellation of multidisciplinary researchers who study the scientific and engineering principles that underlie the Web, to enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and develops new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web under three themes: Future Web, Xinformatics and Semantic Foundations.

TWC goals include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy, educational, societal, and scientific needs. Research areas include: web science, privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, Web-based medical and health systems, semantic escience, data-science, semantic data frameworks, next generation virtual observatories, semantic data and knowledge integration, ontologies, semantic rules and query, semantic applications, data and information visualization, and knowledge provenance, trust and explanation for science. [More...]

TWC In Action

James Michaelis at Graduation Ceremony with Professors Fox, McGuinness and Hendler

James Michaelis at the 2015 graduation ceremony at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with Professors Peter Fox, Deborah L. McGuiness and James Hendler

Patrick West presents his poster "Provenance Capture in Data Access and Data Manipulation Software" at AGU Fall Meeting 2013

Tim Berners-Lee (center) congratulates TWC PhD recipients Greg Williams (left) and Jesse Weaver (right) during a March 2013 visit.

TWC's Peter Fox (center) receives the 2012 EGU Ian McHarg Medal for significant contributions to Earth and Space Science Informatics. Presented by David Arctur (OGC) and Mohan Ramamurthy (Unidata) at EGU 2012.

The Directors of the WSTnet labs, including TWC's Professor Hendler, Professor McGuinness and Joanne S. Luciano, attend a reception at the British Consulate-General’s Residence in Chicago during WebSci2012

Eric Rozell, Ph.D. student with the Tetherless World Constellation, discusses his work with Semantically Enabled Faceted Search at the 2010 Fall Meeting of AGU in San Francisco, CA December 13-17

Web Science Summer Research Week at Tetherless World Constellation, July 2009

TWC students Jesse Weaver and Greg Williams accept award for winning Billion Triple Challenge at ISWC 2009.

James A. Hendler at the Tetherless World Grand Opening

Stephan Zednik presenting at Tetherless World Grand Opening to Professor Deborah L. McGuinness, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, and RPI President Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson.

Li Ding accepts the second prize in the open track of the 2010 Semantic Web Challenge for the development of "TWC LOGD: A Portal for Linking Open Government Data."

Alvaro Graves presents his work at IPAW 2010

Distinguished judges, participants, and the Elsevier and TWC facilitators at the conclusion of #TWCHack11, the Elsevier/Tetherless World Health and Life Sciences Hackathon (June 2011)