document: The web structure of e-government - developing a methodology for quantitative evaluation In this paper we describe preliminary work that examines whether statistical properties of the structure of websites can be an informative measure of their quality . We aim to develop a new method for evaluating e-government . E-government websites are evaluated regularly by consulting companies , international organizations and academic researchers using a variety of subjective measures . We aim to improve on these evaluations using a range of techniques from webmetric and social network analysis . To pilot our methodology , we examine the structure of government audit office sites in Canada , the USA , the UK , New Zealand and the Czech Republic . We report experimental values for a variety of characteristics , including the connected components , the average distance between nodes , the distribution of paths lengths , and the indegree and outdegree . These measures are expected to correlate with ( i ) the navigability of a website and ( ii ) with its `` nodalityö which is a combination of hubness and authority . Comparison of websites based on these characteristics raised a number of issues , related to the proportion of non-hyperlinked content ( e.g. pdf and doc files ) within a site , and both the very significant differences in the size of the websites and their respective national populations . Methods to account for these issues are proposed and discussed . There appears to be some correlation between the values measured and the league tables reported in the literature . However , this multi dimensional analysis provides a richer source of evaluative techniques than previous work . Our analysis indicates that the US and Canada provide better navigability , much better than the UK ; however , the UK site is shown to have the strongest `` nodalityö on the Web .
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