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WEB MINING

Today the internet has made human life more dependent on it right?. In almost everything, the internet has been used. The number of websites and users is increasing gradually. With this noteworthy increase of existing data on the Internet and because of its fast and disordered growth. Web searching has become a tricky procedure for the majority of the users as it makes users feel confused and at times lost in overloaded data that perseveres to enlarge. e-business and web marketing are quickly developing and predicting the requirements of their customers is obvious particularly. As a result, guessing the users’ interests for improving the usability.

What is Web mining?

Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover patterns from the World-Wide-Web. It uses automated methods to extract both structured and unstructured data from web pages, server logs, and link structures.

  • Web content mining - extracts information from within a page.
  • Web structure mining - discovers the structure of the hyperlinks between documents, categorizing sets of web pages and measuring the similarity and relationship between different sites.
  • Web usage - mining finds patterns of usage of web pages.

    • What are the applications of Web Mining?

  • Web mining helps to improve the power of web search engines by classifying the web documents and identifying the web pages.
  • It is used for Web Searching e.g., Google, Yahoo, etc, and Vertical Searching.
  • Web mining is used to predict user behavior.
  • Web mining is very useful for a particular website and e-service.

    • What are the types of web data?
    1. Web Content Data:

    The common forms of web content data are HTML, web pages, images audio-video, etc. The main being the HTML format. Though it may differ from browser to browser the common basic layout/structure would be the same everywhere. Since it’s the most popular in web content data. XML and dynamic server pages like JSP, PHP, etc. are also various forms of web content data.

    2. Web Structure Data:

    On a web page, there is content arranged according to HTML tags. The web pages usually have hyperlinks that connect the main webpage to the sub-web pages. This is called Inter-page structure information. So basically relationship/links describing the connection between web pages are web structure data.

    3. Web Usage Data:

    The main source of data here is WebServer and Application Server. It involves log data which is collected by the main above two mentioned sources. Log files are created when a user/customer interacts with a web page.

    What is web usage mining? :

    Web usage mining , a subset of Data Mining, is basically the extraction of various types of interesting data that is readily available and accessible in the ocean of huge web pages, Internet or formally known as World Wide Web (WWW). Being one of the applications of the data mining techniques, it has helped to analyze user activities on different web pages and track them over a period of time. Basically, Web Usage Mining can be divided into 2 major subcategories based on web usage data.

    Web server data

    The user logs are collected by the Web server. Typical data includes IP address, page reference, and access time.

    Application server data:

    Commercial application servers have significant features to enable E-commerce applications to be built on top of them with little effort. A key feature is the ability to track various kinds of business events and log them in application server logs.

    Application-level data:

    new kinds of events can be defined in an application, and logging can be turned on for them thus generating histories of these specially defined events. Many end applications require a combination of one or more of the techniques applied in the categories above.

    What are the advantages of web mining?

  • Web usage mining essentially has many advantages which make this technology attractive to corporations including government agencies. This technology has enabled e-commerce to do personalized marketing, which eventually results in higher trade volumes.
  • Government agencies are using this technology to classify threats and fight against terrorism.
  • The predicting capability of mining applications can benefit society by identifying criminal activities.
  • Companies can establish better customer relationships by understanding the needs of the customer better and reacting to customer needs faster. Companies can find, attract and retain customers; they can save on production costs by utilizing the acquired insight of customer requirements.
  • They can increase profitability by target pricing based on the profiles created. They can even find customers who might default to a competitor. The company will try to retain the customer by providing promotional offers to the specific customer, thus reducing the risk of losing a customer or customers.

    • What are the disadvantages of web mining?

  • Web usage mining by itself does not create issues, but this technology when used on data of personal nature might cause concerns.
  • The most criticized ethical issue involving web usage mining is the invasion of privacy. Privacy is considered lost when information concerning an individual is obtained, used, or disseminated, especially if this occurs without the individual's knowledge or consent. The obtained data will be analyzed, made anonymous, then clustered to form anonymous profiles.
  • These applications de-individualize users by judging them by their mouse clicks rather than by identifying information. De-individualization, in general, can be defined as a tendency of judging and treating people on the basis of group characteristics instead of on their own individual characteristics and merits.
  • Companies can establish better customer relationships by understanding the needs of the customer better and reacting to customer needs faster. Companies can find, attract and retain customers; they can save on production costs by utilizing the acquired insight of customer requirements.
  • Another important concern is that the companies collecting the data for a specific purpose might use the data for totally different purposes, and this essentially violates the user's interests.

    • The Future of web mining

    To conclude, As the web and its usage continues to grow. The past five have seen the emergence of web mining as a rapidly growing area, due to the efforts of the research community as well as various organizations that are practicing it.

    #web #software #webmining

    - LOGESHWAR S B

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