Local Community Identification through User Access Patterns

Community identification algorithms have been used to enhance the quality of the services perceived by its users. Although algorithms for community have a widespread use in the Web, their application to portals or specific subsets of the Web has not been much studied. In this paper, we propose a technique for local community identification that takes into account user access behavior derived from access logs of servers in the Web. The technique takes a departure from the existing community algorithms since it changes the focus of interest, moving from authors to users. Our approach does not use relations imposed by authors (e.g. hyperlinks in the case of Web pages). It uses information derived from user accesses to a service in order to infer relationships. The communities identified are of great interest to content providers since they can be used to improve quality of their services. We also propose an evaluation methodology for analyzing the results obtained by the algorithm. We present two case studies based on actual data from two services: an online bookstore and an online radio. The case of the online radio is particularly relevant, because it emphasizes the contribution of the proposed algorithm to find out communities in an environment (i.e., streaming media service) without links, that represent the relations imposed by authors (e.g. hyperlinks in the case of Web pages).