Web Mining: a Survey of Current Research, Techniques, and Software

The purpose of this paper is to provide a more current evaluation and update of web mining research and techniques available. Current advances in each of the three different types of web mining are reviewed in the categories of web content mining, web usage mining, and web structure mining. For each tabulated research work, we examine such key issues as web mining process, methods/techniques, applications, data sources, and software used. Unlike previous investigators, we divide web mining processes into the following five subtasks: (1) resource finding and retrieving, (2) information selection and preprocessing, (3) patterns analysis and recognition, (4) validation and interpretation, and (5) visualization. This paper also reports the comparisons and summaries of selected software for web mining. The web mining software selected for discussion and comparison in this paper are SPSS Clementine, Megaputer PolyAnalyst, ClickTracks by web analytics, and QL2 by QL2 Software Inc. Applications of these selected web mining software to available data sets are discussed together with abundant presentations of screen shots, as well as conclusions and future directions of the research.