Advances in Web mining and Web usage analysis

TheWebisaliveenvironmentthatmanagesanddrivesawidespectrumofapp- cations in which a user may interact with a company, a governmental authority, a non-governmental organization or other non-pro? t institution or other users. User preferences and expectations, together with usage patterns, form the basis for personalized, user-friendly and business-optimal services. Key Web business metrics enabled by proper data capture and processing are essential to run an e? ective business or service. Enabling technologies include data mining, sc- able warehousing and preprocessing, sequence discovery, real time processing, document classi? cation, user modeling and quality evaluation models for them. Recipient technologies required for user pro? ling and usage patterns include recommendation systems, Web analytics applications, and application servers, coupled with content management systems and fraud detectors. Furthermore, the inherent and increasing heterogeneity of the Web has - quired Web-based applications to more e? ectively integrate a variety of types of data across multiple channels and from di? erent sources. The development and application of Web mining techniques in the context of Web content, Web usage, and Web structure data has already resulted in dramatic improvements in a variety of Web applications, from search engines, Web agents, and content management systems, to Web analytics and personalization services. A focus on techniques and architectures for more e? ective integration and mining of c- tent, usage, and structure data from di? erent sourcesis likely to leadto the next generation of more useful and more intelligent applications.