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Entity Weight Question

[Mcot]

Hi.  I was wondering if/how an individual entities weight affects the centrality view and the edge weighted view.  By individual entity weight, I am referring to the value in between the <Weight></Weight> tags that you can return to Maltego for each entity.

Also, on the views in general:

The centrality view seems to displays entities larger as the number of outgoing links increases.  It seems to me that the size of the entity in the centrality is not linear according to the number of outgoing links.  In other words if Entity A has 4 outgoing links and another Entity B has 8 outgoing links entity B is NOT twice the size of entity A, it appears to be much much larger.  Can anyone shed some light on the algorithm that determines the size of the entity for the centrality view?

The size of an entity in the edge weighted view seems to be directly related to the number of incoming links.  Can anyone confirm this?


The reason for asking this is because I am trying to design some transforms that generate a nice picture of the data based on certain metrics.  I really need to know how the views are generated so that I can explain what the results mean.

Thanks.

[AndrewMacPherson]

Hi Mcot,

The weight for each node as described by the returned <Weight></Weight> tag has no effect on the edge weighted or centrality view.

The algorithm used in the centrality view is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality , where the value is then normalised between 0 and 1. Anything with a size of 0 is then given a relative size of 0.1 and the nodes centrality is then defined by how it is connected to the other nodes.

I hope this helps.

-AM