Note 17: Universal features vs. contextual interpretation

The last point already made the point that some edge weights representing real-world concepts such as probabilities or friendship do not allow a meaningful interpretation of graph theoretic distances. Such an interpretation is depending on the context, the meaning of the relationships and weights in the real-world. However, hip new "network science" was in part so very hot in contrast to lame, old "social network analysis", because it just applied any kind of measure to all kinds of complex networks to identify structures common to all of them. This was the case for Watts' and Strogatz' seminal paper on Small-Worlds (Watts, 1998) or for Barabási and Albert's paper on Scale-Free Networks (Barabási, 1999).