What do we know about links and linking? A framework for studying links in academic environments

The Web is an enormous set of documents connected through hypertext links created by authors of Web pages. These links have been studied quantitatively, but little has been done so far in order to understand why these links are created. As a first step towards a better understanding, we propose a classification of link types in academic environments on the Web. The classification is multi-faceted and involves different aspects of the source and the target page, the link area and the relationship between the source and the target. Such classification provides an insight into the diverse uses of hypertext links on the Web, and has implications for browsing and ranking in IR systems by differentiating between different types of links. As a case study we classified a sample of links between sites of Israeli academic institutions.