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Create the topology matrix

The topology matrix, also known as the directed adjacency matrix, represents how pages are connected to each other through hyperlink.

There are 2 versions of the topology matrix:

  • for the pages in the curated set of user journeys
  • for the pages in the GOV.UK mirror

The version for the curated set of journeys treats URLs with anchors as pages in their own right. We have deprecated this method.

The version for the GOV.UK mirror ignores anchors.

Create the curated journeys topology matrix

  1. At the root-level of the intent-detector repo folder on your local machine, run jupyter notebook in the command line to open Jupyter.

  2. In Jupyter, go to the notebooks folder, and run the generate_topology_matrix.ipynb notebook.

    This notebook uses the data/external/curated_journey_urls.yaml file which has a list of curated GOV.UK page URLs.

    For example, if the only curated pages are the GOV.UK homepage and the main coronavirus page, the YAML file contains the following:

    target_urls: - / - /coronavirus .

Outputs

When you run the notebook, it downloads the current GOV.UK HTML pages for the pages specified in the YAML file, and saves those pages in the local intent-detector/data/raw/html folder.

If any of the download pages have an anchor heading, the notebook automatically removes all HTML content prior to this heading.

The notebook then creates the curated journeys topology matrix, and saves the matrix as {YYYYMMDD}_{HHMMSS}_govuk_topology_matrix.pickle in the local intent-detector/data/interim/ folder.

Create the GOV.UK mirror topology matrix

In the root of the intent-detector repo folder on your local machine, run python -m src.make_data.generate_topology_matrix in the command line to create the GOV.UK mirror topology matrix.

Outputs

Running the python -m src.make_data.generate_topology_matrix creates the following files in your local intent-detector/data/interim folder:

  • {YYYYMMDD}_{HHMMSS}_govuk_link_list.pickle - a dictionary keyed by URL, where each item contains a list of other URLs that are linked to
  • {YYYYMMDD}_{HHMMSS}_govuk_topology_matrix.pickle - a SciPy sparse matrix, where the first dimension is the from URL, and the second dimension is the to URL
  • {YYYYMMDD}_{HHMMSS}_govuk_vertex_url.pickle - a vector of URLs in the same order as each dimension of the topology matrix, used to slice the topology matrix for URLs of interest

See the commented code at the end of the intent-detector/notebooks/generate_topology_matrix.py file for an example of slicing the topology matrix for a given URL.

This page was last reviewed on 25 March 2022. It needs to be reviewed again on 25 September 2022 by the page owner #insights-and-analytics-alerts .