The research presented in this paper introduces a graph-based and computational modelling approach that derives a social network and computes its emerging spatial and thematic properties from the semantics embedded in a series of Web pages. We apply several local and global graph-based operators, and complement them with thematic, spatial and similarity operators. This allows us to infer the degree of correlation between the different properties of the network. The approach is applied to the study of the GIS research communities as exemplified by the International COSIT and GIScience conferences.
['Pragya Agarwal', 'Roderic Béra', 'Christophe Claramunt']
A social and spatial network approach to the investigation of research communities over the world wide web