Application of webometrics methods for analysis and enhancement of academic site structure based on page value criterion

A. M. Nwohiri ; A. A. Pechnikov

Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta. Prikladnaâ matematika, informatika, processy upravleniâ, Tome 15 (2019) no. 3, pp. 337-352

Résumé

This paper describes a formalized procedure for exploring a site using webometrics methods. The procedure involves gathering details on a site's structure, constructing and exploring the resulting webgraph, defining the correctness criterion, identifying control actions that would improve the structure under the given criterion, testing the correctness criterion on real-world examples and developing recommendations on improving the structure. PageRank is used as a criterion to evaluate the value of web pages. The value is determined by the presence/absence of a link pointing to that page from the homepage of the site. Going by the correctness criterion, valuable pages of a site should have the highest PageRank among all other pages of that site. Control action consists of removing non-valuable directories (and transforming them into independent sites), whose root page has a high PageRank. Experiments are conducted on three faculty sites of major universities in USA, Russia and Nigeria. The approach is shown to be applicable and reasonable in all cases.

Détail

Keywords: website, graph, PageRank, universities, data mining, website structure, web harvesting, web mining, URL.

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