Curvature of Co-Links Uncovers Hidden Thematic Layers in the World Wide Web

Abstract

Beyond the information stored in pages of the World Wide Web, novel types of ``meta-information'' are created when they connect to each other. This information is a collective effect of independent users writing and linking pages, hidden from the casual user. Accessing it and understanding the inter-relation of connectivity and content in the WWW is a challenging problem. We demonstrate here how thematic relationships can be located precisely by looking only at the graph of hyperlinks, gleaning content and context from the Web without having to read what is in the pages. We begin by noting that reciprocal links (co-links) between pages signal a mutual recognition of authors, and then focus on triangles containing such links, since triangles indicate a transitive relation. The importance of triangles is quantified by the clustering coefficient (Watts) which we interpret as a curvature (Gromov,Bridson-Haefliger). This defines a Web-landscape whose connected regions of high curvature characterize a common topic. We show experimentally that reciprocity and curvature, when combined, accurately capture this meta-information for a wide variety of topics. As an example of future directions we analyze the neural network of C. elegans (White, Wood), using the same methods.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, expanded version of earlier submission with more example