Extended Link Analysis for Extracting Spatial Information Hubs

Recently, Web mining that tries to find useful knowledge from the vast amount of Web pages has attracted a lot of research interests. Besides, it is becoming an essential task to provide Web pages related to a user-specified geographic area. In this paper, we propose an approach to extract spatial information hubs from the Web. A spatial information hub is a Web page which is related to a specified geographic area and has much local information and/or many hyperlinks to local Web pages. In the traditional approach of Web link analysis, the importance and quality of pages are judged only by their contents and hyperlink structures. However, we take their geographic localities into consideration. In our approach, we first extract geographic information from Web pages to create spatial nodes and spatial links, then conduct a link analysis based on the extended link structures. We also show our approach works well based on the experiments