TY - GEN SN - 1867-8211 A1 - Guo, YC A1 - Chen, CJ A1 - Zhou, S T3 - Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering Y1 - 2009/// ID - discovery87501 N1 - The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com PB - Springer UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02469-6_45 CY - Berlin / Heidelberg, Germany EP - 1677 TI - Fingerprint for Network Topologies SP - 1666 N2 - A network?s topology information can be given as an adjacency matrix. The bitmap of sorted adjacency matrix (BOSAM) is a network visualisation tool which can emphasise different network structures by just looking at reordered adjacent matrixes. A BOSAM picture resembles the shape of a flower and is characterised by a series of ?leaves?. Here we show and mathematically prove that for most networks, there is a self-similar relation between the envelope of the BOSAM leaves. This self-similar property allows us to use a single envelope to predict all other envelopes and therefore reconstruct the outline of a network?s BOSAM picture. We analogise the BOSAM envelope to human?s fingerprint as they share a number of common features, e.g. both are simple, easy to obtain, and strongly characteristic encoding essential information for identification. KW - BOSAM KW - complex network KW - visualisation AV - public ER -