Researchers from the University of Oviedo have been part of the design of the second The Web Index ranking, promoted by the World Wide Web Foundation, that was presented a few days ago by Tim Berners-Lee in the United Kingdom. Professor José Emilio Labra attended the presentation of the portal in which members of the WESO research team have developed the method to process data.

Labra and his team have managed all the indeces gathered by the experts in Statistics in order to combine them and treat them according to the guidelines of the so-called Semantic Web, whose information may be processed and compared not only by humans, but also by machines. The development and perfectioning of this kind of portals is one of the challenges faced by engineers from around the globe.

The Web Index aims at analyzing economic, political and social factors that may have varied due to the presence of the Internet in each country. On the one hand, it measures the use, percentage of users of Internet in each country and the content available for them. It also measures the infrastructure of communications, political censorship, the impact on society and other variables that may help us in understanding better the reality of each region.

Spain has been relegated from the 18th position in 2012 to the 28th, placing the country after Israel, Greece and Chile. The data shows the impact of the financial crisis and the budgetary and social cuts, which have had consequences in the penetration of online actions.