Scientific publications

This paper describes a formalized procedure for exploring a site using webometrics methods.The procedure involves gathering details on a site’s structure, constructing and exploringthe resulting webgraph, defining the correctness criterion, identifying control actions thatwould improve the structure under the given criterion, testing the correctness criterion onreal-world examples and developing recommendations on improving the structure. PageRankis used as a criterion to evaluate the value of web pages. The value is determined by thepresence/absence of a link pointing to that page from the homepage of the site. Going bythe correctness criterion, valuable pages of a site should have the highest PageRank amongall other pages of that site. Control action consists of removing non-valuable directories(and transforming them into independent sites), whose root page has a high PageRank.Experiments are conducted on three faculty sites of major universities in USA, Russia andNigeria. The approach is shown to be applicable and reasonable in all cases.