The Net, Self-Organization, & Search

[gprice]

Hello from D.C.

This news announcement might be of interest to list members.

Information Organization
Web Organization
"Researchers Discover Internets Self-Organizing Properties"
Full-Text of News Release at:
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0203/0501.html

>From the announcement, "Despite the Internet's decentralized and seemingly 
unorganized nature, scientists at the NEC Research Institute have discovered 
that the Web is in fact naturally self-organizing. This discovery led the 
scientists to develop an algorithm that may change the way that companies 
segment and target specific online audiences...The scientists' research shows 
that the Internet's structure of "clickable" links within web pages allows for 
identification of communities based on specific topics of interest. These 
communities are considered to be natural, in that independently authored pages 
collectively organize them. This research is particularly significant given 
the fact that no central authority or process governs the formation and 
structure of web pages and links...Once affirming the Internet's 
self-organizing properties, Dr. Gary W. Flake and Dr. Steve Lawrence, research 
scientists at the NEC Research Institute, teamed with Dr. C. Lee Giles, a 
professor at Penn State University and Dr. Frans M. Coetzee, chief technical 
officer of GenuOne, to develop the community algorithm. This algorithm enables 
businesses and individuals to zero in on specific information by focusing on 
communities of web pages that are related to one-another...For example, an 
individual wishing to study the latest scientific findings on breast cancer 
research is able to locate medical literature, treatments and new developments 
without wading through the pages of irrelevant material that a normal Internet 
search on the subject might produce. This is possible because NEC's algorithm 
utilizes link information to generate its results, rather than specific text 
that may appear on countless web pages."


See Also: The full news release mentions a paper appearing in the March '02 
issue IEEE Computer. I've been unable to find an open access copy of it on the 
web. However, I have found a another paper by Flake, Lawrence, and Giles on 
this topic. "Efficient Identification of Web Communities (2000)''

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rd/17588403%2C326538%2C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http%253A%252F%252Fciteseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/15889/http%253AzSzzSzwww.neci.nj.nec.comzSzhomepageszSzflakezSzkdd2000.pdf/flake00efficient.pdf
-
See Also: Dr. Lawrence and Dr.Giles are the co-founders of ResearchIndex, a 
search tool for computer science and information technology literature on the 
web. 
http://www.researchindex.com


cheers,
gary


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----------------------

Gary D. Price, MLIS
Librarian
Gary Price Library Research and Internet Consulting
gprice at gwu.edu