The Web has become such a force in commerce and culture that a group of leading university researchers now deems it worthy of its own field of study.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain plan to announce on Thursday that they are starting a joint research program in Web science.

“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Berners-Lee said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”

Web science is related to another emerging interdisciplinary field called services science. This is the study of how to use computing, collaborative networks and knowledge in disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology to lift productivity and develop new products in the services sector, which represents about three-fourths of the United States economy. Services science research is being supported by technology companies like I.B.M., Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.

Privacy, for example, will be one area of research in Web science. The traditional approach to protecting privacy has been to restrict access to databases containing personal information. But so much personal information is already available on the Web, often given voluntarily on sites like MySpace and Facebook, that the old approach will not work, said Daniel J. Weitzner, technology and society director at the Web consortium.