Web Mining Overview

In the span of a decade, the World Wide Web has been transformed from a tool for information sharing among researchers into an indispensable part of everyday activities. This transformation has been characterized by an explosion of heterogeneous data and information available electronically, as well as increasingly complex applications driving a variety of systems for content management, e-commerce, e-learning, collaboration, and other Web services. This tremendous growth, in turn, has necessitated the development of more intelligent tools for end users as well as information providers in order to more effectively extract relevant information or to discover actionable knowledge. From its very beginning, the potential of extracting valuable knowledge from the Web has been quite evident. Web mining (i.e. the application of data mining techniques to extract knowledge from Web content, structure, and usage) is the collection of technologies to fulfill this potential. In this article, we will summarize briefly each of the three primary areas of Web mining—Web usage mining, Web content mining, and Web structure mining— and discuss some of the primary applications in each area.