Chapter 21 Web Mining — Concepts , Applications , and Research

Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to extract knowledge from web data, including web documents, hyperlinks between documents, usage logs of web sites, etc. A panel organized at ICTAI 1997 (Srivastava and Mobasher 1997) asked the question " Is there anything distinct about web mining (compared to data mining in general)? " While no definitive conclusions were reached then, the tremendous attention on web mining in the past five years, and a number of significant ideas that have been developed, have certainly answered this question in the affirmative in a big way. In addition, a fairly stable community of researchers interested in the area has been formed, largely through the successful series of WebKDD workshops, which have been held annually in conjunction with the