Web Community Browser

Introduction

Web community is a collection of web pages created by individuals or any kind of associations that have a common interest on a specific topic. For example, a community of computer software vendors, game fans, etc. We had extracted 100 thousands communities from 40 million web pages in Japan by using link analysis technique. We also extracted relationships between the communities at the same time. We call set of communities and their relationships "Web Community Chart". This method to extract the chart is developed by Toyoda et al.

"Web Community Browser" is a tool to browse the Web Community Chart. The browser shows communities and their relationships as an indirected graph, and its layout is optimized by physics-based graph layout algorithm.

Middle panel shows the a part of the chart. Each labeled rectangle shows a community, and related communities are linked by a line. Each community has 10-20 web pages. Top 7 pages are showed by a web browser beside the main panel.

The user can dynamically edit the chart to extract the structure of the chart.