Web Mining – Data Mining Concepts, Applications, and Research Directions

Abstract: The prolific growth of web-based applications and the enormous amount of data involved therein led to the development of techniques for identifying patterns in the web data. Web mining refers to the application of data mining techniques to the World Wide Web. Web usage mining is the process of extracting useful information from web server logs based on the browsing and access patterns of the users. The information is especially valuable for business sites in order to achieve improved customer satisfaction. Based on the user�s needs, Web Usage Mining discovers interesting usage patterns from web data in order to understand and better serve the needs of the web based application. Web Usage Mining is used to discover hidden patterns from weblogs. It consists of three phases like Preprocessing, pattern discovery and Pattern analysis. In this paper, we present each phase in detail, the process of extracting useful information from server log files and some of application areas of Web Usage Mining such as Education, Health, Human-computer interaction, and Social media.

Keywords: Web Mining, Data Mining, World Wide Web, server log files.