Studying the Regional Cyberspace by Exploiting Internet Sequential Information Flows

The study of cyberspace is faced with the challenge of the data shortage and model verification. This paper proposed a method to explore the regional cyberspace by employing Internet sequential information flows crawled from social network platforms. Compared with previous studies which only use one type of data sources for analysis, the main contribution of this manuscript is adopting the scheme that uses one kind of Internet information flow to extract cyberspace feature while relevant data collected from the other network platform is used for verification. Moreover, starting from measuring the informatization level of a region, a modified gravity model is designed by adding the value of informatization level to the traditional method. Then, an information association matrix based on the improved gravity model is constructed for analyzing the characteristics of cyberspace. To demonstrate the efficiency, Fuzhou city is considered as an interesting regional sample in this paper. The reasonable results indicate that the proposed approach is practical for regional cyberspace.