Web Science/Part2: Emerging Web Properties/How big is the World Wide Web/3 ways to study the Web

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3 ways to study the Web

Learning goals

  1. The web as a software system.
  2. The web as a collection of text documents.
  3. The web as a graph of interlinked documents.
  4. Even when choosing 1 point of view we have fundamentally different ways of modelling.

Video

Script

Quiz

1 Which are the fundamental types of Models the web can be seen as?

Descriptive Model
Predictive Model
Software system
Graph Model
Generative Model
Collection of Text documents

2 Which of the following are Pros of looking at the Web as a collection of Text documents

Methods from the field of Software engineering can be applied
Amount of information on the web can be quantified via entropy
Methods from Natural language processing and information retrieval can be applied
Structural information can easily be analysed

3 Which of the following are Cons of looking at the Web as a graph of connected Web Pages

Large amount of data to Model
Ignores crucial information
Trust of web pages cannot be determined
Hard to have a good measure for the size of the Web

4 Which of the following statements about modelling the Web are true?

Generative Models are created to understand why certain properties arise on the Descriptive Models of the Web.
Descriptive Models are created to understand why certain properties arise on the Generative Models of the Web.
Descriptive Models help understanding what properties the World Wide Web has.
When studying the Web as a graph one must use Generative Models.
When studying the Web as a collection of Text documents one must use Descriptive Models.
Descriptive and Generative Models can be used to model collections of text documents as well as graphs of web pages.


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