Web issue analysis: an integrated water resource management case study
Thelwall, Mike Vann, Katie Fairclough, Ruth
Thelwall, Mike
Vann, Katie
Fairclough, Ruth
Editors
Other contributors
Affiliation
Epub Date
Issue Date
2006
Submitted date
Alternative
Abstract
In this article Web issue analysis is introduced as a new technique to investigate an issue as reflected on the Web. The issue chosen, integrated water resource management (IWRM), is a United Nations-initiated paradigm for managing water resources in an international context, particularly in developing nations. As with many international governmental initiatives, there is a considerable body of online information about it: 41,381 hypertext markup language (HTML) pages and 28,735 PDF documents mentioning the issue were downloaded. A page uniform resource locator (URL) and link analysis revealed the international and sectoral spread of IWRM. A noun and noun phrase occurrence analysis was used to identify the issues most commonly discussed, revealing some unexpected topics such as private sector and economic growth. Although the complexity of the methods required to produce meaningful statistics from the data is disadvantageous to easy interpretation, it was still possible to produce data that could be subject to a reasonably intuitive interpretation. Hence Web issue analysis is claimed to be a useful new technique for information science.
Citation
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(10): 1303-1314
Publisher
Journal
Research Unit
PubMed ID
PubMed Central ID
Embedded videos
Additional Links
Type
Journal article
Language
en
Description
Metadata only
Series/Report no.
ISSN
15322882
15322890
15322890