Mining and Tracking Evolving User Profiles and More – A Real Life Case Study

Personalization tailors a user’s interaction with the Web information space based on information gathered about them. Declarative user information such as manually entered profiles continue to raise privacy concerns and are neither scalable nor flexible in the face of very active dynamic Web sites and changing user trends and interests. One way to deal with this problem is through a completely automated Web personalization system. Such a system can be based on Web usage mining to discover Web usage profiles, followed by a recommendation system that can respond to the users’ individual interests. While there have been considerable advances in the field of Web usage mining, there have been no detailed case studies presenting fully integrated approaches to mine a real website with the challenging characteristics of today’s websites, such as evolving access patterns and dynamic content. We present a case study summarizing our preliminary approach and findings in mining web usage patterns from the Web log files of a real life website that has all the challenging aspects of real life web usage mining, including evolving user profiles and access patterns, dynamic web pages, and external data describing an ontology of the web content. We also present a simple approach to enrich the discovered user profiles with explicit information need as inferred from search queries extracted from the Web log data.