icegov2012 proceedings

An Initial Exploration of Hyperlinks of African Government
Portal Websites
Abebe Rorissa
Department of Information Studies, University at Albany, State University of New York
Draper 113, 135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY 12222
arorissa@albany.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper presents preliminary results of an exploratory analysis
of hyperlinks from (outlinks) and to (inlinks) government portal
Websites of African countries. Analyses of the data revealed the
nature of the portal Websites and the countries in terms of their
online presence and visibility.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.1. Public Policy Issues; K.4.3. Organizational Impacts; K.5.2.
Governmental Issues
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Documentation, Performance,
Design
Keywords
Government Portal Websites; Africa; Hyperlink Analysis
1. INTRODUCTION
African governments have fully embraced the Web over the last
two decades to provide e-government services [2] and by the turn
of the last decade of the new millennium, every African country
had at least one e-government Website albeit at various levels of
e-government service development [4]. During this same period,
more and more African countries also recognized the power of
government portal Websites as one-stop shops to promote and
publicize their activities as well as provide essential information
and government services.
In order to interconnect various resources and provide easy access
to information sources contained within their Web pages,
government portal Websites use hyperlinks. The ability to
interconnect a large number of Web pages, via hyperlinks,
enabled us to organize information and knowledge in distributed
environments. In addition, hyperlinks contain information that is
implicit. For instance, a hyperlink could be “regarded as an
endorsement of the target page” ([7], p. 27) and the more useful
and informative pages are often those that attract more hyperlinks
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
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pointing to them. The fact that the number of Web pages that link
to a particular page is an indication of its importance has been
long established. For instance, Google’s
PageRank algorithm [1], which works based on the premise that
hyperlinks to a web page or inlinks are “trust votes”, takes this
fact into account and ranks Websites accordingly.
As part of an exploratory study, the current work is the first to
look into hyperlinks of African government portal Websites and
attempts to answer the questions: What is the nature of the
hyperlinks of African government portal Websites? Does the
nature of the hyperlinks vary by region and population size?
2. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
A single official government portal Website for each country was
identified through an extensive Web search during a one month
period in March and April 2012. A search over the same four
week period produced no legitimate Websites that could be
considered government portals for Guinea, Guinea-Bissau,
Somalia, and Tunisia. Of the 50 remaining African countries,
33(66%) had portals while 9(18%) Websites of presidencies,
5(10%) Websites of Ministries of Foreign Affairs, 1(2%) Website
of a Ministry of Information, 1(2%) Website of a Prime Minister,
1(2%) Website of a National Transitional Council were identified
and considered for analysis. The numbers of outlinks and inlinks
were determined using a combination of online tools such as Web
crawlers (e.g., SocSciBot4 [6]) and methods. Care was taken in
order to avoid counting internal links on the portal Website,
sometimes included on a Web page for navigational purposes [5].
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The 50 African countries were divided into five groups matching
the UN’s five regions of Africa. Northern Africa and Southern
Africa, respectively, were regions with the least (Total=189,
Median=25) and most (Total=1484, Median=67) number of Web
pages on government portal Websites. It should be noted that
because Tunisia’s portal was not available during data collection,
its counts could not be added to the total for Northern Africa. A
contributing factor for Southern Africa’s large number and
median count of the number of Web pages could have also been
Botswana’s contribution, with a portal Website that had by far the
highest on the continent and 79.45% of the total number of Web
pages on government portal Websites for Southern African
countries. The median number of Web pages on a government
portal Website for the continent was 38. Each region had median
number of Web pages closer to the median number of Web pages
on portal Websites for the entire continent (except, perhaps,
Southern Africa due to, once again, Botswana’s count). The