Preface

Contents

Link Analysis has been developed over the past 20 years in various fields including Discrete Mathematics (Graph Theory), Social Sciences (Social Network Analysis) and Computer Science (graph as a data structure). Recently this area has attracted a wider attention for its applicability in law enforcement investigations (e.g., terrorism, money laundering), fraud detection (e.g., insurance, banking), WWW analysis (e.g., search engines, marketing), telecommunications (e.g., routers, traffic, connectivity), and similar. Particularly interesting are problems and issues that fall within the intersection of Link Analysis and fields such as Web and Text Mining, Relational Data Mining, and more general, Data Mining. Typical examples are in the area of trend analysis, community identification, Web user profiling, media clipping, marketing, etc., where Link Analysis complements other fields of research and derives additional value from information processing. Another interesting scenario is extraction of information from unstructured data, representation of extracted data in the graphical form, and further analysis of the resulting graph structure to derive and discover new knowledge.