Web Community Chart: a Tool for Navigating the Web and Observing its Evolution

We propose a web community chart that is a tool for navigating the Web and for observing its evolution through web communities. A web community is a set of web pages created by individuals or associations with a common interest in a topic. Recent research shows that such communities can be extracted by link analysis. Our web community chart is a graph of whole communities, in which relevant communities are connected by edges. Using this chart, we can navigate through related communities. Moreover we can answer historical queries about topics on the Web and understand sociology of web community creation, by observing when and how communities emerged and evolved. We observe the evolution of communities by comparing three charts built from Japanese web archives crawled in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Several metrics are introduced for measuring the degree of community evolution, such as growth rate, novelty. Finally, we develop a web community evolution viewer that allows us to extract evolving communities using the relevance and metrics. Several evolution examples are shown using this viewer. key words: link analysis, web community, web community chart, evolution