Résumé en anglais

This paper presents the first results of a study on the bargaining process of web standards in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) arenas. This process is analysed through bargaining habits and through networks of actors who take part in it. The data collection is based on information about individuals who play the game : Who are they? In the name of whom do they talk? etc. Official chats and forums, web home pages and personal pages are exploited by ad hoc crawling methods, and stored in an XML data warehouse. This warehouse is based on the semi-structured database model, which is a flexible tree-patterned schema, very different from the well-known classical relational tables and traditional data warehousing techniques. This structure can improve the management of sociological inquiries, by allowing an evolutive strategy of querying, based on categorization. It simplifies the research process prior to quantitative work (statistics, factorial analyses, structural network analyses). In this paper, we present both the foundations and architecture of the warehouse, and the sociological results that have been gathered so far using these novel techniques.