Mapping University-Industry-Government Relations on the Internet: the construction of indicators for a Knowledge-Based Economy.

University-industry-government relations can be indicated by using advanced search engines on the Internet. This methodology provides us with opportunities to construct time series, compare among nations, distinguish between the use of national languages as against English, map relational patterns, etc. On the occasion of the Third Triple Helix Conference in Rio de Janeiro (April 2000), we focused on the comparison between Brazil and The Netherlands, with reference to an international baseline. The data can easily be reproduced for other countries. In addition to studying the different domains and their university-industry-government relations, we analyze, among other things, the role of the respective (national) languages. The major findings are: (1) patterns of development are similar in shape, but different in size when comparing Brazil with The Netherlands, and with the international environment; (2) "industry-government" relations are enhanced in the national dimension, while "university-industry" relations are profiled in the (international) "any language" domain; and (3) labels which can be controlled by actors (like title words of web pages) reflect upon (and thus lag behind) structural features of the databas