  Online communities have increased in size and importance dramatically over
the last decade. The fact that many communities are online means that it is
possible to extract information about these communities and the connections
between their members much more easily using software tools, despite their
potentially very large size. The links between members of the community can be
presented visually and often this can make patterns in the structure of
sub-communities immediately obvious. The links and structures of layered
communities can also be formalized to gain a better understanding of their
modelling. This paper explores these links with some specific examples,
including visualization of these relationships and a formalized model of
communities using the Z notation. It also considers the development of such
communities within the Community of Practice social science framework. Such
approaches may be applicable for communities associated with cybersecurity and
could be combined for a better understanding of their development.
