Discovering shared interests through co-outlinking in a municipal web space

In webometric research interlinking and co-inlinking has been studied extensively, but co-outlinking has been used as a data collection and research method only in a couple of studies before. Yet it may have some potential as a tool for mapping shared interests of organizations creating the outgoing links. This research studied this potential of co-outlinking and mapped the shared interests of 54 municipalities in Finland. The research showed that co-outlinking can in fact be used to map shared interests and perhaps even cooperation but the method required a lot of manual cleansing and classification of the data. Although the results were promising cooutlinking cannot be recommended unless some improvements are developed for classification of the link data.