The Laborious Way From Data Mining to Web Log Mining

The web is a large source of information that can be turned into knowledge. Part of this knowledge concerns the usage of the web itself and is invaluable to the organization of web sites that meet their purposes and prevent disorientation. Data mining is already being used to throw light in various aspects of web utilization. For one major aspect, the discovery of navigation patterns, we show that a new mining model is necessary. We formalize the notion of navigation pattern, introduce a model for navigation pattern discovery by extending the classical model of association rules' discovery, and establish the processing framework of this model. Conventional tools for association rule discovery and for sequence analysis cannot deal with this discovery problem. However, we show how they can be used as preprocessors to reduce the search space before the actual mining phase.