Mining networks and central entities in Digital Libraries. A graph theoretic approach applied to co-author networks

Abstract

Based on graph theoretic concepts, the paper introduces the notion of a social network for mining central entities in bibliographic Digital Libraries. Due to this issue, several concepts of centrality in social networks have been employed that evaluate the strategic position of actors in a social network. Moreover, the paper discusses a structural technique (MPA*) that optimizes network propagation and the evaluation of actor centrality without imposing low depth threshold. The models proposed have been applied to co-author networks for finding human experts in scientific domains. The expressiveness of our network model is demonstrated by testing the precision of document sets that have been ranked by author centrality. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.