A connectionist approach for evaluating the complexity of interaction in the World Wide Web: the case of news groups

The method and the metrics described can be used to understand and manage a large amount of collaborative groups like a Web community of interest or company forums. Some of these groups are self built and free, others are more supervised but there is a lack of tools to easily follow their activity. The metrics presented associated to thematic metrics can be used in a company to reduce the amount of groups. Indeed the redundancy of groups is very difficult to follow as the numbers of groups grows. In the Usenet hierarchy, for example there is more than 20 groups on the Linux subject (excluding language differences).