Personal web usage mining

Personal Web Usage Mining
Mining client side Web Usage Data

Web Usage Mining
The discovery of patterns in the browsing and navigation
data of Web users.
Web usage mining has been an important technology for
understanding user’s behaviors on the Web.
Currently, most Web usage mining research has been
focusing on the Web server side.
The main purpose of research is to improve a Web site’s
service and the server’s performance.
Data sources for Web usage mining are primarily Web
server logs. Although it is very important and interesting
to investigate server side issues, we argue that an
equally important and potentially fruitful aspect of Web
usage mining is the mining of client side usage data.

Web Usage Mining on Server Side
Currently, Web usage mining finds patterns in Web server
logs. The logs are preprocessed to group requests from
the same user into sessions.
A session contains the requests from a single visit of a
user to the Web site. During the preprocessing, irrelevant
information for Web usage mining such as background
images and unsuccessful requests is ignored. The users
are identified by the IP addresses in the log and all
requests from the same IP address within a certain time-
window are put into a session.
Different heuristics have been developed to deal with the
inaccuracy due to caching, IP sharing or blocking, and
network congestion.

Web Usage Mining on Server Side
Some common characteristics
• Their goal is to improve Web services and performance
Through the improvement of Web sites, including their
contents, structure, presentation, and delivery.
• They focus on the mining of server side data. Their data
sources are almost exclusively server logs, sometimes with
site structure and/or page contents.
• They target groups of users instead of individual users. It is
overwhelming for a Web site to deal with users on an
individual basis.

Individual’s Web usage, rather than group behaviors.
By looking into a user’s Web usage data, we hope to
understand the user’s interests, behaviors, and
preferences.
In other words, we are building the user’s Web profile.
We call this personal Web usage mining since it focuses
on personal Web usage.

Some of the reasons we advocate personal Web usage
mining are as follows.
• The goal of personal Web usage mining is to help and
enhance individual users Web use. It intends to make the
Web easier to use from a single user’s point of view.
• Client side data provide a more accurate and complete
picture of a user’s Web activities.
• We can achieve true individualism and personalization.
● Users have full control of what, when, and how their
data can be used for mining.
● Personal Web usage has increased significantly
recently,

Some researchers are building intelligent agents or
Internet agents that will help individuals use the Web. For
example, many agents were built for information filtering
and gathering on the Web.
WARREN is a multi-agent system for compiling financial
information.
WEBMATE edits a personal newpaper.
WebSifter is a meta-search agent which uses taxonomy
to improve search on the Web.
Other examples include home page finder , user
interface learning agent, and Web browsing assistant.
Although some aspects and pieces of personal Web
usage mining may be around in various areas such as
intelligent agent, Web warehousing, and Web usage
mining,

Two kinds of user Web activities are recorded for
analysis:
● The remote activities
include requests sent by a user to a Web server. Such
kind of click stream data includes the URLs of pages as
well as any keywords, queries, forms, and cookies sent
with the URL.
The remote activities can be captured by almost all Web
browsers. Besides, the browsers also cache the Web pages
in most cases.

Two kinds of user Web activities are recorded for
analysis:
● The local activities
include actions the user can take at his or her desktop
without the knowledge of Web servers. They include,
but are not limited to, the following.
Save a page, Print a page, Click Back on browser, Click Forward on
browser, Click Reload on browser, Click Stop on browser, Email a
link/page, Add a bookmark, Minimize/maximize/close window, Change
visual settings such as font size.
The local activities can be recorded by an activity recorder, which is a
client side program running on top of the browser.

These two kinds of activities are put together into an
activity log. Each entry in the activity log will contain a
timestamp and an activity. Some will contain extra
information such as URL, cache address,keyword,
cookie, email address, and font size.
The schema of the log looks like this:
(timestamp, activity, [URL], [cache address],[keyword],
[cookie], [email address], [other optional fields])

There are four major modules in the framework:
● Logging
● Data Warehousing
● Data mining
● Tool/Application.

In the logging module, user Web activities are stored
into the activity, as well as the cached pages.
In the data warehousing module, the logs and cached
pages are cleansed, extracted, transformed, aggregated,
and stored in a data warehouse. The data warehouse will
facilitate search, query, and OLAP operations, in the
mean time providing data sources for mining.
In the data mining module, various data mining
algorithms are applied to the data in the data warehouse,
whose findings will be used by the tools and applications
in the tool/application module.

Personal web usage mining

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