An Online Platform for Focal Structures Analysis-Analyzing Smaller and More Pertinent Groups Using a Web Tool

Biological networks are increasingly becoming available for the researchers and practitioners to mineand analyze meaningful structures. The traditional approaches, such as detecting communities/clusters, do not focus on smaller and more relevant groups of individuals. We design and develop a powerful web tool (focalstructures.net) to identify focal structures, influential sets of individuals, in a given network. This paper demonstrates the online usage of the Focal Structures Analysis (FSA) approach and aims to give a brief understanding what a focal structure is about. Besides biological networks, the FSA approach can be experimented on different application domains (such as social networks) as well. The web tool helps researchers and practitioners to mine smaller and meaningful structures in an easier and more accessible way.