Interlinking between Asia-Pacific University Web sites

An investigation into the pattern of international interlinking between Asia-Pacific university Web sites is described. AltaVista advanced searches were used for the data collection and network diagrams used to portray the results from four perspectives. It was found that each of the four angles allowed novel interpretations of the data, but that Australia and Japan were nevertheless clearly at the heart of the Web in the region, with Australia being a particularly common target of links and Japan having a more balanced profile of ingoing and outgoing hyperlinks. Interestingly, one of the perspectives mimicked an official grouping of less wealthy countries in the region whilst another contained the more developed countries, with Singapore and Thailand appearing in both. It was hypothesised that the nature of larger Web sites covered was qualitatively different from that of smaller ones, making the deduction of relationships between the hosting institutions difficult from the link counts alone.