Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 2 The strongest settlement-to-settlement ties (over 15,000 connections)
When looking at maps of absolute connection numbers it seems obvious that the
largest numbers appear between the most populated cities. The overall record was
measured between Budapest and Debrecen (the first and second largest cities in
Hungary) with more than 1.8 million individual intercity connections. Other major
connections are typically located between regional or subregional centres, which
perform as hubs in the network. Certainly the most important hub is Budapest with
naturally the highest total number of connections.
One may argue, however, that maps of raw connection numbers represent only
the ties between populated places and not the strength of a connection between any
two settlements. On the contrary, maps of edges with log-normalized weights could
set off important connections regardless of settlement size. Figure
3
shows the
strongest ties between settlements according to the log-likelihood ratios of connec-
tions, however, only those over the ratio of 4.0 are visible. This limit was chosen
since it really covers the strongest links of the network and also because the overall
number of connections is still manageable at this point in order to be properly
visualized. The map shows altogether 34,968 connections, hence reflects the spatial
pattern of the most important ties from a local perspective.
Figure
3
can be considered also as a combination of different level
log-likelihood ratio weight maps. If we separate the LLR maps as individual layers
(Fig.
4
) the main characteristics of iWiW network topology would outcrop. It seems
that the higher the LLR weight between two settlements the shorter the connecting
line. In other words it is definitely observable on the map of connections with LLR
weights over 7 that extreme strong network connections are between settlements
