The web structure of e-government - developing a methodology for quantitative evaluation

ABSTRACT

In this paper we describe preliminary work that examines whether statistical properties of the structure of websites can be an informative measure of their quality. We aim to develop a new method for evaluating e-government. E-government websites are evaluated regularly by consulting companies, international organizations and academic researchers using a variety of subjective measures. We aim to improve on these evaluations using a range of techniques from webmetric and social network analysis. To pilot our methodology, we examine the structure of government audit office sites in Canada, the USA, the UK, New Zealand and the Czech Republic.We report experimental values for a variety of characteristics, including the connected components, the average distance between nodes, the distribution of paths lengths, and the indegree and outdegree. These measures are expected to correlate with (i) the navigability of a website and (ii) with its "nodalityö which is a combination of hubness and authority. Comparison of websites based on these characteristics raised a number of issues, related to the proportion of non-hyperlinked content (e.g. pdf and doc files) within a site, and both the very significant differences in the size of the websites and their respective national populations. Methods to account for these issues are proposed and discussed.There appears to be some correlation between the values measured and the league tables reported in the literature. However, this multi dimensional analysis provides a richer source of evaluative techniques than previous work. Our analysis indicates that the US and Canada provide better navigability, much better than the UK; however, the UK site is shown to have the strongest "nodalityö on the Web.

REFERENCES

• 1: Accenture 'Leadership in Customer Service: New Expectations, New Experiences', The Government Executive Series, April 2005
• 2: Michelangelo Diligenti , Frans Coetzee , Steve Lawrence , C. Lee Giles , Marco Gori, Focused Crawling Using Context Graphs, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.527-534, September 10-14, 2000
• 3: A. Caldas 'On the Web Structure and Digital Knowledge Bases', 2004.
• 4: Cap Gemini, 'Online Availability of Public Services: How is Europe Progressing? Web-based survey on electronic public services, Report of the fifth measurement', European Commission Directorate General for Information Society and Media, 2004.
• 5: D. Dalziel, 'Government online: A multi-country study of e-government usage', World Association of Research Professionals, 2004.
• 6: C. C. Demchak, C. Friis, T.M. La Porte, 'Webbing governance: National differences in constructing the public face', in G. D. Garson (ed.) Handbook of Public Information Systems (New York: Marcel Dekker Publishers), 2000.
• 7: N. Eiron,, K. S. Mccurley 'Locality, Hierarchy, and Bidirectionality in the Web', Workshop on Web Algorithms and Models, 2003.
• 8: W. H. Dutton, C. di Genarro, A. Millwood, 'The Internet in Britain: The Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), Hargrave, May 2005,
• 9: I. Graafland-Essers, E. Ettedgui, 'Benchmarking E-Government in Europe and the U.S', Rand Research, 2003.
• 10: M. Hindman, K. Tsioutsiouliklis, J. A. Johnson, 'Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web', 2003.
• 11: C. Hood, 'The Tools of Government', Macmillan, 1983.
• 12: C. Hood, H. Margetts, 'The Tools of Government in the Digital Age' (London: Palgrave), 2006.
• 13: Todd M. La Porte , Chris C. Demchak , Christian Friis, Webbing governance: global trends across national-level public agencies, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.1, p.63-67, Jan. 2001 [doi>10.1145/357489.357509]
• 14: Taylor Nelson Sofres, 'Government Online: An international perspective', Annual Global Report, 2003.
• 15: United Nations, 'World Public Sector Report 2003: E-Government at the Crossroad',s Department of Economics and Social Affairs (New York: United Nations), 2003.
• 16: D. West, 'Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance', (Princeton University Press), 2005.
• 17: Wouter de Nooy , Andrej Mrvar , Vladimir Batagelj, Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2004
• 18: H. W. Park, 'Hyperlink Network Analysis: A New Method for the Study of Social Structure on the Web', Connections 25(1):49--61, 2003.
• 19: Mike Thelwall, Conceptualizing documentation on the web: an evaluation of different heuristic-based models for counting links between university web sites, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.53 n.12, p.995-1005, October 2002 [doi>10.1002/asi.10135]
• 20: L. Page, S. Brin, R. Motwani, T. Winograd 'The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web', Tech. Rep., Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project, 1998.
• 21: Krishna Bharat , Bay-Wei Chang , Monika Rauch Henzinger , Matthias Ruhl, Who Links to Whom: Mining Linkage between Web Sites, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, p.51-58, November 29-December 02, 2001
• 22: X. He, H. Zha, C. Ding, H. Simon 'Web document clustering using hyperlink structures', CS&DA 41:19--45, 2001.
• 23: B. A. Huberman,, P. Pirolli, J. E. Pitkow, R. M. Lukose, 'Strong Regularities in World Wide Web Surfing'. Science, 280, pp 95--97, 1998.
• 24: Lada A. Adamic , Bernardo A. Huberman, The Web's hidden order, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.9, p.55-60, Sept. 2001 [doi>10.1145/383694.383707]
• 25: B. Huberman, L. Adamic, 'Growth dynamics of the World-Wide Web', Nature, vol. 399 pp. 130, 1999.
• 26: Sergey Brin , Lawrence Page, The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, v.30 n.1-7, p.107-117, April 1, 1998
• 27: Andrei Broder , Ravi Kumar , Farzin Maghoul , Prabhakar Raghavan , Sridhar Rajagopalan , Raymie Stata , Andrew Tomkins , Janet Wiener, Graph structure in the Web, Proceedings of the 9th international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks : the international journal of computer and telecommunications netowrking, p.309-320, June 2000, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 28: Soumen Chakrabarti , Byron Dom , Prabhakar Raghavan , Sridhar Rajagopalan , David Gibson , Jon Kleinberg, Automatic resource compilation by analyzing hyperlink structure and associated text, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7, p.65-74, April 1998, Brisbane, Australia
• 29: Soumen Chakrabarti , Byron E. Dom , S. Ravi Kumar , Prabhakar Raghavan , Sridhar Rajagopalan , Andrew Tomkins , David Gibson , Jon Kleinberg, Mining the Web's Link Structure, Computer, v.32 n.8, p.60-67, August 1999 [doi>10.1109/2.781636 ]
• 30: David Gibson , Jon Kleinberg , Prabhakar Raghavan, Inferring Web communities from link topology, Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems: links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems, p.225-234, June 20-24, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/276627.276652]
• 31: Jon M. Kleinberg, Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.46 n.5, p.604-632, Sept. 1999 [doi>10.1145/324133.324140]
• 32: Ravi Kumar , Prabhakar Raghavan , Sridhar Rajagopalan , Andrew Tomkins, Trawling the Web for emerging cyber-communities, Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, v.31 n.11-16, p.1481-1493, May 17, 1999
• 33: Gary William Flake , Steve Lawrence , C. Lee Giles , Frans M. Coetzee, Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities, Computer, v.35 n.3, p.66-71, March 2002 [doi>10.1109/2.989932 ]
• 34: International Telecommunication Union 'Internet indicators: Hosts, Users and Number of PCs', 2004.
• 35: R. Albert, H. Jeong, A. Barabßsi, 'Diameter of the World-Wide Web'. Nature, 401 (September 1999), 130.
• 36: S. Zhou, R. J. Mondragon, 'Accurately modeling the Internet topology', Physical Review E, vol. 70, no. 066108, the American Physical Society, 2004.
• 37: J. Laherrre, D. Sornette., 'Stretched exponential distributions in nature and economy: 'fat tails' with characteristic scales', The European Physical Journal B - Condensed Matter, 2(4), pp 525--539, 1998.
• 38: P. Ingversen, 'The calculation of Web impact factors', Journal of Documentation, 4(2), pp 236--243, 1998.
• 39: Linyuan Lu, The diameter of random massive graphs, Proceedings of the twelfth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms, p.912-921, January 07-09, 2001, Washington, D.C., United States
• 40: M. Thelwall, D. Stuart, 'Web crawling ethics revisited: Cost, privacy and denial of service', to appear in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: Navigation; Architectures

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.1 Public Policy Issues

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
e-government, national audit offices, network, ranking, webmetric