jleyva in Métricas Web continues his series of articles on web metrics with an explanation of Web Graph Properties.
The properties of a Web Graph can be measured by considering the web site to be like a directed graph where the nodes are pages and the edges are the links between the pages. Such a graph represents the organizational structure of the information contained in the site and understanding it may help the creator to improve site navigation. At a higher level, the nodes are web sites and the edges are the links between web sites.
There are three types of graph properties:
- Centrality. This property reflects the connectivity of one node with respect to the other nodes of the graph. A central node is one that minimizes the distances to the other nodes; identifying this is the first step in creating easily navigable structures.
- Global Metrics. These describe the properties of the set of nodes. There are two types of such metrics: compactness and stratum:
- Compactness indicates the connections in the graph; a graph with a compactness of 0 is a graph that is completely disconnected (no links between the nodes) while a graph of compactness of 1 is completely connected (all the nodes are connected to all the other nodes).
- Stratum indicates the linear ordering of a graph. A graph with a high stratum makes navigation difficult. In a web site this would force a user to pass through a high number of pages to get from the initial page to another.
- Local metrics. These measure the individual characteristics of the nodes of a graph. There are two types of such metrics; depth and imbalance.
- The depth of a node is the distance of this node from the central node. It indicates the ease of access to the node from the root. Nodes with a high depth are less important in the graph. In a web site, these would be the more hidden pages.
- The Imbalance metric is based on the assumption that each node contains one idea. Links from the node are developments of that idea. The metric identifies nodes that are roots of imbalanced trees - in a web site where one idea is developed more in one direction than in another.
Studies of the World Wide Web seem to indicate that it can be best described by a Random Graph Model where the connectivity between the nodes is independent of the size of the graph. This means that the average distance between any pair of web sites is usually a small number.
Joserra in Najaraba.com mentions that he sees a similarity between the Struts framework that he has been using for developments in J2EE and the new Ajax framework that has become so fashionable in the last few weeks. Both have as their goal the improvement of the user interface in web applications.
Javier Gutiérrez Chamorro (Guti) in Bitácora de Guti writes that he has been using SlickEdit for writing source code since version 8. He is very impressed with the improvements in version 10 with respect to the performance, user interface and re-factoring. The only point in its dis-favour is the price which starts at 284€ in Spain. The only alternative, CodeWright, seems to have been abandoned by Borland.
jasm in chochurro has been trying to develop a touch-screen point of sale application using FiveWin for some time but became bored with the number of problems that he kept coming up against. In this article he describes his experiences with Xailer which are much better. His screen design can be viewed here.
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