Research Issues in Web Mining

Web is a collection of inter-related files on one or more web servers while web mining means extracting valuable information from web databases. Web mining is one of the data mining domains where data mining techniques are used for extracting information from the web servers. The web data includes web pages, web links, objects on the web and web logs. Web mining is used to understand the customer behaviour, evaluate a particular website based on the information which is stored in web log files. Web mining is evaluated by using data mining techniques, namely classification, clustering, and association rules. It has some beneficial areas or applications such as Electronic commerce, E-learning, Egovernment, E-policies, E-democracy, Electronic business, security, crime investigation and digital library. Retrieving the required web page from the web efficiently and effectively becomes a challenging task because web is made up of unstructured data, which delivers the large amount of information and increase the complexity of dealing information from different web service providers. The collection of information becomes very hard to find, extract, filter or evaluate the relevant information for the users. In this paper, we have studied the basic concepts of web mining, classification, processes and issues. In addition to this, this paper also analyzed the web mining research challenges.