Data mining in a closed Web environment

The need to understand the fabric of relationships that are building up on the World Wide Web calls for the application of tools that allow one to extract the underlying knowledge. Some of the most interesting relationships are those that are brought to light by co-linking analysis (the Web analogue of cocitation analysis). We here propose such an analysis based on the co-links that are generated within a closed web environment, using multivariate statistics (Principal Component Analysis, and Multidimensional Scaling) and a connection-based technique (Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps). An application was made to a generic thematic environment, and the underlying relationships and structures were manifest in the interpretation of the results.