Title: Surveying the identification of communities

Authors: Anna Puig-Centelles, Oscar Ripolles, Miguel Chover

Addresses: Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informaticos, Universitat Jaume I, 12071 Castellon, Spain. ' Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informaticos, Universitat Jaume I, 12071 Castellon, Spain. ' Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informaticos, Universitat Jaume I, 12071 Castellon, Spain

Abstract: Nowadays, many networks of interest include a variety of social and technological networks, which are naturally divided into communities. The identification of these community structures has considerably attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. Thus, this paper reviews the main algorithms for finding communities and locating meaningful structures. The survey starts from graph theory and includes the latest algorithms for detecting web communities. The existence of communities that can overlap is also taken into account, as well as the main commonly used software tools for depicting communities.

Keywords: social networks; web based communities; online communities; virtual communities; graph clustering; community algorithms; distance measure; similarity indices; cluster validation; clustering applications.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2008.019193

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2008 Vol.4 No.3, pp.334 - 347

Published online: 02 Jul 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article