What is it about?
We all have a sense that everything is becoming more complicated. Wherever we look, it seems that every thing or group has an ever increasing number of parts, steps, or people, and an increasing number of connections between them. But there are ways to simplify and explore what may initially seem too complicated for us to understand. Intuitively we think of our family as a collection of people who are related in various way. This way of thinking can be extended to social networks, where you record the names and relationships among a group of people. With this information you can find out who's most popular and who may be the best person to talk to when you need something. It may come as a surprise to know they are not always the same person. Now, replace people with power plants and relationships with power lines and you can find ways to make the delivery of electricity to a million homes more reliable. Substitute plants and animals in an ecosystem for power plants, and consume or consumed by for power lines and you can get a sense for what would happen if one of those organisms became extinct. We don't have to throw up our hands and admit defeat when something seems too complicated to understand, because often, it's not. We just have to think about it in a different way.
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Why is it important?
In scientific publishing and research, citations reflect how often other researchers may have considered and referenced ideas in a given publication. Citation frequency can be one indicator of the importance of a publication. Citation networks can be very useful for librarians who want to guide patrons to important research in a given field, and to library patrons who want to quickly evaluate a collection of publications to figure out which ones to read first. Co-authorship and keyword networks are other examples of networks that exist within the information libraries collect about publications to help users find content. So if you know how to construct and analyze networks, you can reuse this skill to tackle many information seeking tasks.
Perspectives
Graphs, or networks, are a deceptively simple, yet powerful tool for looking at the world. You can approach the topic in a shallow or deep fashion and still benefit from and apply what you learn. As you think of new questions to ask, you can explore how other researchers modeled and explored complex systems of interest to them, and apply techniques they used to your own models even if the models represent vastly different systems. I was so taken by the power of network models and network analysis that I found myself coming back to these ideas over and over again, and eventually revisited the ideas in this paper and wrote a book about them, which is called "A Librarian's Guide to Graphs, Data and the Semantic Web."
James Powell
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Graphs in Libraries: A Primer, Information Technology and Libraries, December 2011, Boston College University Libraries,
DOI: 10.6017/ital.v30i4.1867.
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