RESEARCH ISSUES IN WEB MINING

International Journal of Computer-Aided Technologies (IJCAx) Vol.2, No.3, July 2015
DOI:10.5121/ijcax.2015.2305 55
RESEARCH ISSUES IN WEB MINING
Dr.S. Vijiyarani1
and Ms. E. Suganya2
1
Assistant professor, Department of Computer science, School of Computer Science and
Engineering,
Bharathiar University, Coimbatore
2
M.Phil Research Scholar, Department of Computer science, School of Computer
science and
Engineering, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore
ABSTRACT
Web is a collection of inter-related files on one or more web servers while web mining means extracting
valuable information from web databases. Web mining is one of the data mining domains where data
mining techniques are used for extracting information from the web servers. The web data includes web
pages, web links, objects on the web and web logs. Web mining is used to understand the customer
behaviour, evaluate a particular website based on the information which is stored in web log files. Web
mining is evaluated by using data mining techniques, namely classification, clustering, and association
rules. It has some beneficial areas or applications such as Electronic commerce, E-learning, E-
government, E-policies, E-democracy, Electronic business, security, crime investigation and digital library.
Retrieving the required web page from the web efficiently and effectively becomes a challenging task
because web is made up of unstructured data, which delivers the large amount of information and increase
the complexity of dealing information from different web service providers. The collection of information
becomes very hard to find, extract, filter or evaluate the relevant information for the users. In this paper,
we have studied the basic concepts of web mining, classification, processes and issues. In addition to this,
this paper also analyzed the web mining research challenges.
KEYWORDS
Web Mining, Classification, Application, Tools, Algorithms, Research Issues
1. INTRODUCTION
Web mining is the application of data mining technique which is an unstructured or semi-
structured data and it automatically discovers and extracts potentially useful and previously
unknown information or knowledge from the web [23]. The significant web mining applications
are website design, web search, search engines, information retrieval, network management, E-
commerce, business and artificial intelligence, web market places and web communities. Online
business breaks the barrier of time and space as compared to the physical office business. Big
companies around the world are realizing that e-commerce is not just buying and selling over
Internet, rather it improves the efficiency to compete with other giants in the market. This
application includes the temporal issues for the users.

56
Web mining has three classifications namely, web content mining, web structure mining and web
usage mining. Each classification is having its own algorithms and tools. Web content mining is
nothing but the discovery of valuable information from web documents and these web documents
may contain text, image, hyperlinks, metadata and structured records. It is used to look at the
information by search engine or web spiders i.e. Google, Yahoo. It is the process of retrieving the
useful information from the web content or web documents. Web structure mining is also a
process of discovering structured information from the websites. The structure of a graph consists
of web pages and hyperlinks where the web pages are considered as nodes and the hyperlinks are
edges and these are connecting between related pages. Web usage mining is also called as web
log mining. It reflects the user’s behaviour which can catch the meaningful patterns from one or
more web localities [9].
Web mining process consists of four important steps, they are, resource finding, data selection
and pre-processing, generalization and analysis [23]. Resource finding is the process which is
used to extract the data either from online or offline text resources. In data selection and pre-
processing step, specific information from retrieved web sources are automatically selected and
pre-processed. During generalization, data mining and machine learning techniques are used to
discover general patterns from individual web sites as well as across multiple sites. Validation
and interpretation of the mined patterns are done in analysis step. [1][17]. Web mining is
classified into three different categories, they are, web content mining, web structure mining and
web usage mining. This is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Classification of Web Mining
The remaining section of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the research
issues in web mining. Web content mining and its research challenges are given in Section 3.
Section 4 describes web structure mining. Section 5 provides the details about web usage mining.
Conclusions are given in Section 6.

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2. RESEARCH ISSUES IN WEB MINING
The web is highly dynamic; lots of pages are added, updated and removed everyday and it
handles huge set of information hence there is an arrival of many number of problems or issues.
Normally, web data is high dimensional, limited query interface, keyword oriented search and
limited customization to individual users. Due to this, it is very difficult to find the relevant
information from the web which may create new issues. Web mining techniques are
classification, clustering and association rules which are used to understand the customer
behaviour, evaluate a particular website by using traditional data mining parameters. Web mining
process is divided into four steps; they are resource finding, data selection and pre-processing,
generalization and analysis [11] [8]. Web measurement or web analytics are one of the significant
challenges in web mining. The measurement factors are hits, page views, visits or user sessions
and find the unique visitor regularly used to measure the user impact of various proposed
changes. Large institutions and organizations archive usage data from the web sites [10]. The
main problem is that, detecting and/or preventing fraud activities. The web usage mining
algorithms are more efficient and accurate. But there is a challenge that has to be taken into
consideration. Web cleaning is the most important process but data cleaning becomes difficult
when it comes to heterogeneous data [20]. Maintaining accuracy in classifying the data needs to
be concentrated. Although many classification techniques exist the quality of clustering is still a
question to be answered.
2.1 Major issues in Web Mining
• Web data sets can be very large, it takes ten to hundreds of terabytes to store on the
database
• It cannot mine on a single server so it needs large number of server
• Proper organization of hardware and software to mine multi-terabyte data sets
• Limited customization, limited coverage, and limited query interface to individual users
• Automated data cleaning
• Over fitting and Under fitting of data
• Over sampling of data
• Scaling up for high dimensional data
• Mining sequence and time series data
• Difficulty in finding relevant information
• Extracting new knowledge from the web
3. WEB CONTENT MINING
Web content mining data may be structured or unstructured/semi structured even though much of
web is unstructured. It is the process of retrieving the information from the web into more
structured forms and indexing the information to retrieve quickly or finding valuable information
from web content or web documents. Web content mining includes the web documents which
may consist of text, html, multimedia documents i.e., images, audio, video and sound etc. The
search result mining contains the web search results. It may be a structure documents or
unstructured documents.

58
Web content mining used many algorithms and tools such as Genetic algorithm, Cluster
Hierarchy Construction Algorithm (CHCA), Correlation algorithm. Web Info Extractor (WIE),
Mozenda, screen-scrapper, ontology based tools; web content extractor and automation anywhere
are content mining tools. Cloud users require to extract the information from the cloud provided
by web servers can make use of the web mining. For instance, Web communities can be
maintained the information such as facebook. That is the users of same field of interest can be
grouped and they can communicate through the network. Digital library performs automated
citation indexing using web mining techniques. E-services include e-banking, search engines, on-
line auctions, on-line knowledge management, social networking, e-learning, blog analysis, and
personalization and recommendation systems. This can be analyzed for the customers and enable
provision to the customers based on their recommendations [18]. It has two approaches; they are
(i) Agent based and (ii) Database Approach. Figure 2 gives the web content mining approaches.
Figure2. Web Content Mining approaches
(i) Agent Based Approach
Agent based approach focuses on searching relevant information from the World Wide
Web. Three types of agents they are
(i) Intelligent search agents – Automatically searches for information along with a particular
query
(ii) Information filtering/categorizing agents - Filters the data
(ii) Personalized web agents – Discovers the documents those are related to the user
profiles
(iii)Database Approach
Database approach consists of databases which contain attributes, tables and schema with
defined domains. It focused on techniques for organizing the semi structured data on the web into
more collections of resources, and using standard database querying mechanism and data mining
techniques to analyze it, for example multilevel database and web querying system [5].

59
Web content mining has the other approaches to mine the data. These are unstructured text data
mining, structure mining, and semi-structure text mining and multimedia data mining [16].
3.1 RESEARCH ISSUES ON WEB CONTENT MINING
Web content mining has number of research issues because it can extract the information from
the web search engines.
• Data / Information Extraction concentrate on extraction of structured data from web
pages such as products and search results.
• Web information integration and schema matching. The web contains large amount of
data, each website accept similar information in a different way. Similar data discovery is
an important problem with lots of realistic applications.
• Opinion extraction from online sources i.e. customer makes sure of products, forums,
blogs and chat rooms. Mining opinions are of big consequence for marketing intelligence
and product benchmarking.
• Automatically segmenting web pages and detecting noise is an interesting problem in
web application. It could not have advertisements, navigation links and copyrights
notices. Hence, extracting the main content of the web page is important problem in web
application [19].
4. WEB STRUCTURE MINING
Web structure mining is the study of data interconnected to the structure of a particular website. It
consists of web graph which contains the web pages or web documents as nodes and hyperlinks
as edges those are connecting between two related pages [7]. Figure 3 represents the web graph
structure.
Figure3. Web Graph Structure
Web structure is useful source for extracting information. Web structure is to extract some
interesting web graph patterns like co-citation, social choice, complete bipartite graphs, etc [1]. It
classifies the web page on various topics and deciding which web page is to be added into the
collection of web pages. Web structure mining can be performed either at intra-page level or
inter-page level. A hyperlink that connects to a different part of the same page is called intra-page
hyperlink. It is a document structure level [22].

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A hyperlink that connects two different pages are called inter-page hyperlink which is structure
level [12]. Web page is organized in tree structure format based on HTML tags. Here, the
documents are extracted automatically by the Document Object Model (DOM). The main reason
for developing link mining is to understand the social organization of the web. The research of
structure analysis is called Link mining [14] which is located in the connection of work in link
analysis, hypertext and web mining, relational learning, inductive logic programming and graph
mining. Some of the important tasks of link mining are link based classification, link based
cluster analysis, link type, link strength and link cardinality. The research of the hyperlink level is
also called hyperlink analysis [22] which can be used to retrieve useful information from the web
[13].
Web structure mining is used in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. HITS algorithm was
used in clever search engine by IBM and the page rank algorithm is used by Google [11].
Algorithms of web structure mining are HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Search) algorithm, Max
flow- Min cut algorithm, ECLAT algorithm, and Page rank algorithm. Page rank algorithm can
be divided into two types. One is weighted page rank algorithm and another one is Topic
sensitive page rank algorithm.
4.1 RESEARCH ISSUES ON WEB STRUCTURE MINING
Web structure mining has two issues due to its huge amount of data.
• Reducing irrelevant search results. Relevance of search information becomes
unorganized due to the problem search engines often only tolerate for low precision
criteria.
• Indexing information on the web [7]. This causes low amount of recall with content
mining.
5. WEB USAGE MINING
Web usage mining is also called as web log mining which is used to analyze the behaviour of
online users [2]. It fed into two types of tracking; one is general access tracking and another one
is customize usage tracking [3]. The general access tracking is used to predict the customer
behaviour on the web and it identifies the user while the user interacts with the web. It can store
the data automatically when the web server log and application log [15]. The web log is located in
three different locations they are web server log, web proxy server and client browser and it
contains only plain text file (.txt). The large amounts of irrelevant data are available in the web
log file because it contains noisy data, large amount of incomplete, eroded and unnecessary
information [6]. Web server log files are used to identify the errors and failed requests were given
by the web master and the system administrator. Web usage mining is to extract the data which
are stored in server access logs, referrer logs, agent logs and error logs.
Web usage mining generally uses basic data mining algorithms such as association rule mining,
sequential rule mining, clustering, and classification. It has several tools to analyze the behaviour
of the user. They are KOINOTITES, web SIFT, web usage miner, INSITE, speed tracer,
Archcollect, i-Miner, AWUSA, i-JADE web miner, Web Quilt, STRATDYN, SEWeP, webTool,
MiDAS, web mate, WebLog Miner, DB2Intelligent miner of Data, Poly Analyst version 6.0,
Clemetine, WEBMINER, WEBVIZ. Figure 4 shows the different web server logs [1].

61
Figure4: Web Server Logs
5.1 WEB SERVER LOGS
5.1.1 Access log
Access log is used to capture the information about the user and it has many numbers of
attributes. It will record each click event, hits and access of the user. It is one of the web server
logs [16].
5.1.2 Agent log
Agent log is used to record the details about online user behaviour, user’s browser, browser’s
version and operating system. It is a standard log file while comparing the access log.
5.1.3 Error log
When user click on a particular link and the browser does not display the particular page or
website then the user receives error 404 not found.
5.1.4 Referrer log
Referrer log is used to store the information of the URLs of web pages on other sites that link to
web pages. That is, if a user gets to one of the server‘s pages by clicking on a link from another
site, the URL of that site will appear in this log [21].
5.2 PROCESS OF WEB USAGE MINING
Web usage mining process is generally divided into three tasks:
5.2.1 Data pre-processing
Web log data pre-processing is nothing but, to identify users, sessions, page views and so on. In
order to improve the efficiency and scalability many steps are required, these are, data fusion,

62
data cleaning, user identification by IP address, authentication data, cookies, client information
and site topology, session identification, formatting, and path completion [6].
5.2.2 Pattern discovery
The data mining techniques and algorithms are used to perform in the pattern discovery by using
clustering, association rules and sequential analysis. The association technique is mostly used in
pattern discovery for detection of relation between visited pages by online users. It is used to
extract patterns of usage from web data [4]. The extract pattern can be stand for in many ways
such as graphs, charts, tables and forms.
Figure5. Process of web usage mining
5.2.3 Pattern analysis
The last process of the web usage mining is pattern analysis. There are so many techniques are
used for pattern analysis such as visualization technique, OLAP technique, data and knowledge
querying and usability analysis [4].
5.3 RESEARCH ISSUES ON WEB USAGE MINING
Web usage mining has several issues because it involves number of data mining techniques. The
problems are [11]
• Session identification
• CGI data
• Catching
• Dynamic pages
• Robot detection and filtering
• Transaction identification

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6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper has discussed about the research issues and challenges in web mining and also
provided detailed review about the basic concepts of web mining, web content mining, structure
mining, usage mining, tools, algorithms and types. Several open research issues and drawbacks
which are exists in the current techniques are also discussed. This study and review would be
helpful for researchers those who are doing their research in the domain of web mining.
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BIOGRAPHY
Dr. S. Vijayarani has completed MCA, M.Phil and Ph.D in Computer Science. She is
working as Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering,
Bharathiar University, Coimbatore. Her fields of research interest are data mining,
privacy and security issues in data mining and data streams. She has published papers
in the international journals and presented research papers in international and
nationalconferences.
Ms. E. Suganya has completed M.Sc in Computer Science. She is currently pursuing
her M.Phil in Computer Science in the School of Computer Science and Engineering,
Bharathiar University, Coimbatore. Her fields of interest are Data Mining and Web
Mining.

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