Title: Connectivity inferences over the web for the analysis of semantic networks

Authors: Roderic Bera, Christophe Claramunt

Addresses: Department of Geomatic Engineering, University College, London, UK. ' Naval Academy Research Institute, Lanveoc-Poulmic, BP 600, 29240 Brest Naval, France

Abstract: The World Wide Web constitutes a large information space and a promising support for the development of data inference, analysis and mining mechanisms. The research presented in this paper introduces a modelling approach that derives a social network and computes some of its emerging properties, from the semantics exhibited from a domain knowledge embedded in a series of web pages. The framework is applied to the research communities related to a series of conferences in a given domain, and the university connections materialised by the researcher trajectories over time. The properties of the social network are analysed using graph-based measures, and a novel geographical dispersion coefficient.

Keywords: semantic web; social networks; geographical analysis; GIS; geographical information systems; connectivity inferences; web GIS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2007.012050

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2007 Vol.3 No.2, pp.123 - 138

Published online: 15 Jan 2007 *

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