When Turkish Development Agency approached me for a collaborative project with Başarsoft, it was as scary as it was attractive for a social network analysis practicioner like myself. The idea was to analyze the flows of people, goods, and communication between towns in Turkey related to health, education, trade activities. The aim: to provide extensive reports and a portal which government agencies, corporations, or non-profits can use to plan their service centers or activities. I’ve got to work with a brilliant team of urban development experts, and I’ve got to work with a very extensive data set collected from various state agencies’ well developed e-government systems. The portal named YERSİS is open to anyone interested to explore and query the project’s outputs. The project report related to social network analysis can be found here. During the project I have used several state of the art methods from social network analysis field, and in addition have developed a unique index to measure geographic span of activities we have studied. The index is a pending patent, but it will soon be published in a scientific article (to be announced in this blog).
