Compactness in Linked Hypertext

Global metrics look at extracting information about the graph as a whole. Compactness is a measure of how connected the graph is; a compact graph means that, in general, it is easy to reach a randomlychosen node from another. The usual measure has a range between 0 (totally disconnected nodes) and 1 (universal connections). Compactness of 0 is obviously hopeless for an information space, but perhaps less obviously the graph shouldn't be too compact either; if authors of webpages are sparing and thoughtful about what they link to, their links are likelier to be useful. There are also methods for discovering whether a graph is balanced or unbalanced, i.e. some parts of the graph are less well-connected compared to others, and therefore perhaps missing information. Balance is a property of an individual node on the graph, and is meant to express the intuition that, in a reasonably expressive Web resource, links can be interpreted as further developments of ideas in the resource, and that therefore if some of the links are very well connected and others rather sparsely connected, then it might be the case that the former denote a very well-developed topic while the latter could be improved with the addition of further links [40].

A brief summary of compactness in understanding web topology and balance.