Web Mining and Knowledge Discovery of Usage Patterns

Abstract

Web mining is a very hot research topic which combines two of the activated research areas: Data Mining and World Wide Web. The Web mining research relates to several research communities such as Database, Information Retrieval and Artificial Intelligence. Although there exists quite some confusion about the Web mining, the most recognized approach is to categorize Web mining into three areas: Web content mining, Web structure mining, and Web usage mining. Web content mining focuses on the discovery/retrieval of the useful information from the Web contents/data/documents, while the Web structure mining emphasizes to the discovery of how to model the underlying link structures of the Web. The distinction between these two categories isn't a very clear sometimes. Web usage mining is relative independent, but not isolated, category, which mainly describes the techniques that discover the user's usage pattern and try to predict the user's behaviors.