[FRIAM] looking for a word

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Maybe.  But I tend to think of a hub as a kind of homogenous mixing point.  E.g. a bicycle hub has all the spokes connnecting to the hub at equal distances.  For water flow, something like a sewage treatment plant might have a reservoir into which pipes or canals feed, where the pipes/canals are all roughly the same length and enter the reservoir at similar distances and (possible) flow rates (pipe sizes, etc.).

A river confluence, for example, might have 2 streams merge at one point, then a 3rd stream merge in later,  a stream merging with a big stream, etc.  So, there's some implication that the merging/branching is heterogeneous.

Abstracting the detail of such a thing would definitely make it some sort of "mixing hub".  But it wouldn't be "well-mixed" if you zoomed in.  All concrete hubs (e.g. Unilever in a supply chain model or whatnot) *do* have some sort of internal structure you can see when you zoom in, though.  So, maybe a qualified phrase like "fractal hub" would work?


On 08/17/2018 10:53 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> A hub?
> 
> On 8/17/18, 11:47 AM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>     
>     I need a word (or short phrase) to refer to the portion of a network where the edges converge or diverge (more than other parts of the network.  Examples might be a river delta or the branching (debranching?) of blood vessels or lungs.  "Plexus" or "knot" don't work because they could ambiguously refer to something like a tapestry or ... well, a knot, where each thread remains separate, but winds around other threads.  Something close to "canalization" seems appropriate. But I don't want to imply the generation (or dissolution) of the thing.  E.g. [arter|ang]iogenesis are not the type of words I'm looking for.
>     
>     There's got to be a good word for such, perhaps from graph theory or "network theory".  Any help will be rewarded by an IOU for a pint of beer. 8^)


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ