Web Community Chart

Web community chart 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 has shown 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 have observed the evolution of communities by comparing Japanese web archives crawled for 5 years.

(Masashi Toyoda)