Web Mining in Soft Computing Framework : Relevance , State of the Art and Future

| The article summarizes the diierent characteristics of web data, the basic components of web mining and its diierent types, and their current states of the art. The reason for considering web mining, a separate eld from data mining, is explained. The limitations of some of the existing web mining methods and tools are enunciated, and the signiicance of soft computing (comprising fuzzy logic, ar-tiicial neural networks, genetic algorithms and rough sets) highlighted. A survey of the existing literature on`soft web mining' is provided along with the commercially available systems. The prospective areas of web mining where the application of soft computing needs immediate attention are outlined with justiication. Scope for future research in de-veloping`soft web mining' systems is explained. An extensive bibliography is also provided.