Adaptive Web Presence and Evolution through Web Log Analysis
traffic. It would be beneficial if the website can FUTURE TRENDS
cache these small size documents in memory. For
e-commerce websites, the highly populated items
should be arranged to allow fast access because
these items will compose over 50% of the total
requests. These insights are helpful for the better
design and adaptive evolution of the web sites.
2. Clustering and Classification – Techniques to
group a set of items with similar characteristics
and/or to map them into predefined classes.
In the web log analysis domain, there are two
major clusters of interest to discover: web usage
clustering and web pages clustering. Clustering
of web usage can establish the groups of users
that exhibit similar browsing behaviors and infer
user demographic information. Such knowledge
is especially useful for marketing campaign in
e-commerce applications and personalized web
presence. On the other hand, clustering analysis
of the web pages can discover the web pages with
related content. This is useful for the development
of Internet search engine. Classification can be
accomplished through well developed data mining
algorithms including Bayesian classifier, k-nearest
neighbor classifier, support vector machines, and
so on (Duda et al., 2000).
3. Associative Rules – Associative rules mining
is to find interesting associations or correlations
among large data sets. In the web log mining
domain, one is interested in discovering the
implications or correlations of user access pat-
terns. For example, users who access page A also
visit page B; customers who purchase product C
also purchase product D. A typical associative
rule application is market basket analysis. This
knowledge is useful for effective web presence
and evolution by laying out user friendly hyper
links for easier access. It can help for e-commerce
web site to promote products as well.
4. Sequential Patterns – The sequential patterns
mining attempts to find inter-transaction patterns
such that the presence of one event is followed
by another (Mannila et al., 1995, Srikant and
Agrawal, 1996). In the context of web log analy-
sis, the discovery of sequential patterns helps to
predict user visit patterns and to target certain
groups based on these patterns.
A
With the explosive growth of the Internet and ever
increasing popularity of e-commerce, privacy is be-
coming a sensitive topic that attracts many research
efforts. How to make sure the identity of an individual
is not compromised while effective web log analysis
can be conducted is a big challenge. An initiative called
Platform for Privacy Preference (P3P) is ongoing at the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). How to analyze
the web log online and make timely decision to update
and evolve the web sites is another promising topic.
CONCLUSION
An effective web presence is crucial to enhance the
image of a company, increase the brand and product
awareness, provide customer services, and gather
information. The better understanding of the web’s
topology and user access patterns, along with model-
ing and designing efforts, can help to develop search
engines and strategies to evolve the web sites. Web logs
contain potentially useful information for the study of
the effectiveness of web presence. The components
of web log analysis are described in this chapter. The
approaches and challenges of acquisition and prepro-
cessing of web logs are presented. Pattern discovery
techniques including statistical analysis, clustering and
classification, associative rules and sequential pattern
are discussed in the context of web log analysis towards
adaptive web presence and evolution.
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