Properties of bridge nodes in social networks

Abstract

The main goal of the paper is to describe the properties of the nodes within a social network that connect the peripheral nodes and peripheral groups with the rest of the network. These nodes are usually called bridging nodes or simply bridges. All the experiments are carried out on the real data, so-called Thurman network. First, the regular cliques, peripheral nodes and peripheral cliques from a network are extracted and then the bridging nodes identified. Afterwards for all nodes their characteristic features, such as social position and degree of nodes, are calculated. Finally, we try to find the correlation between nodes centrality and their degree and the fact if given node is a bridge or not. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.