Software Agent for Locating and Analyzing Virtual Communities on the World Wide Web

Category: Other Technologies

Reference Number: 00451

Description

A social sciences researcher has developed a novel crawling algorithm informed by sociological network theory and keyword association to automatically locate virtual communities of interest around a particular issue, identify key actors within the community, and determine the content patterns that characterize the communications of such key actors.

The software application draws upon the downloaded results of its crawls, as well as publicly available web information resources, to collect quantitative and qualitative data about the characteristics of sites in the community, and to output them in a form that can be used by standard statistical, content analysis, and other data processing software.

Applications

• Locating a virtual community of sites that focus on a particular topic area, and isolating the most influential sites within that community
• Analyzing the determinants of a site’s popularity
• Determining which types of sites are most likely to link to a known major resource site on a particular topic and what interest groups these sites represent
• Determining how closely sites representing two different interest groups are linked to one another

Main Advantages

• Allows non-expert users to systematically identify the virtual community of web sites concerned with a particular issue, and to single out those sites with the most influence within that community
• Allows users to automatically generate a wide range of link, content, geographical, age, and popularity data about sites without manually exploring the sites themselves as well as the various public references on the internet relating to site characteristics

Inventor(s)

Sun-ki Chai, Ph.D.
Department of Sociology

Contact Information

For licensing information, please contact Lee Taylor at ltaylor2@hawaii.edu

For all other inquiries, please write to:

Office of Technology Transfer & Economic Development
University of Hawai’i
2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 280
Honolulu, HI 96822