Web Mining - The Ontology Approach

The World Wide Web today provides users access to extremely large number of Web sites many of which contain information of education and commercial values. Due to the unstructured and semi-structured nature of Web pages and the design idiosyncrasy of Web sites, it is a challenging task to develop digital libraries for organizing and managing digital content from the Web. Web mining research, in its last 10 years, has on the other hand made significant progress in categorizing and extracting content from the Web. In this paper, we represent ontology as a set of concepts and their inter-relationships relevant to some knowledge domain. The knowledge provided by ontology is extremely useful in defining the structure and scope for mining Web content. We will therefore review Web mining and describe the ontology approach to Web mining. The application of these Web mining techniques to digital library systems will also be discussed.