Since the Web is the biggest and most widely known information source that is easily accessible and searchable, on the positive side, there is widespread participation in authoring content. Web consists of billions of interconnected documents (called Web pages) which are authored by millions of people. Web Mining aims to discover the informative knowledge or information from massive data sources available on the Web by using data mining or machine learning approaches. Web usage mining is one of the categories of Web mining which discovers user behavioral patterns from searches and accesses logs of user interactions with Websites. This book presents methods, approaches and techniques to perform three main tasks of Web usage mining that are called Preprocessing, Pattern Discovery, and Pattern Analysis. Another main part discussed in this book is Web server log file Analysis. Mainly this book is suitable for researchers who are interested in the techniques and applications of Web search, Web data management, Web mining and Web recommendation as well as Web usage mining for in-depth academic research and industrial development to gain rapid knowledge in related areas.

The proliferation of information on the world wide web has made the personalization of this information space a necessity. One possible approach to web personalization is to mine typical user profiles from the vast amount of historical data stored in access logs. In the absence of any a priori knowledge, unsupervised classification or clustering methods seem to be ideally suited to analyze the semi-structured log data of user accesses. In this paper, we define the notion of a user session, as well as a dissimilarity measure between two web sessions that captures the organization of a web site. To extract a user access profile, we cluster the user sessions based on the pair-wise dissimilarities using a robust fuzzy clustering algorithm that we have developed. We report the results of experiments with our algorithm and show that this leads to extraction of interesting user profiles. We also show that it outperforms association rule based approaches for this task.

WorkshopTheme The ease and speed with which business transactions can be carried out over the Web has been a key driving force in the rapid growth of electronic commerce. In addition, customer interactions, including personalized content, e-mail c- paigns, and online feedback provide new channels of communication that were not previously available or were very ine?cient. The Web presents a key driving force in the rapid growth of electronic c- merceandanewchannelforcontentproviders.Knowledgeaboutthecustomeris fundamental for the establishment of viable e-commerce solutions. Rich web logs provide companies with data about their customers and prospective customers, allowing micro-segmentation and personalized interactions. Customer acqui- tion costs in the hundreds of dollars per customer are common, justifying heavy emphasis on correct targeting. Once customers are acquired, customer retention becomes the target. Retention through customer satisfaction and loyalty can be greatly improved by acquiring and exploiting knowledge about these customers and their needs. Althoughweblogsarethesourceforvaluableknowledgepatterns,oneshould keep in mind that the Web is only one of the interaction channels between a company and its customers. Data obtained from conventional channels provide invaluable knowledge on existing market segments, while mobile communication adds further customer groups. In response, companies are beginning to integrate multiple sources of data including web, wireless, call centers, and brick-a- mortar store data into a single data warehouse that provides a multifaceted view of their customers, their preferences, interests, and expectations.

The arrival of World Wide Web (WWW) has brought in huge amount of data which keeps growing dynamically. This necessitates the requirement of new tools and processes that can intelligently and automatically transform data into useful information and knowledge, especially such knowledge, which is subtle and hidden in the data. Knowledge Discovery is such a process. Knowledge discovery takes the form of Web mining for extracting useful and meaningful information from the Web. Web Mining revolves around automatic discovery and extraction of useful information from World Wide Web documents and services. Web usage mining is one of the web mining techniques which involves the task of discovering the activities of the user while they are browsing or navigating through the web. The navigation preferences of the visitors can be analyzed to enhance the quality of electronic commerce services, to personalize the web portion, to improve the web structure and server performances. This book aims at discovering interesting patterns from web log data by means of applying novel algorithms and presenting the results.

The Web is the nervous system of information society. As such, it has a pervasive influence on our daily lives. And yet, in some ways the Web does not have a high MIQ (Machine IQ). What can be done to enhance it? This is the leitmotif of "Intelligent Exploration of the Web," (lEW)--a collection of articles co-edited by Drs. Szczepaniak, Segovia, Kacprzyk and, to a small degree, myself. The articles that comprise lEW address many basic problems ranging from structure analysis of Internet documents and Web dialogue management to intelligent Web agents for extraction of information, and bootstrapping an ontology-based information extraction system. Among the basic problems, one that stands out in importance is the problem of search. Existing search engines have many remarkable capabilities. But what is not among them is the deduction capability--the capability to answer a query by drawing on information which resides in various parts of the knowledge base. An example of a query might be "How many Ph.D. degrees in computer science were granted by European universities in 1996?" No existing search engine is capable of dealing with queries of comparable or even much lower complexity. Basically, what we would like to do is to add deduction capability to a search engine, with the aim of transforming it into a question-answering system, or a QI A system, for short. This is a problem that is of major importance and a challenge that is hard to meet.

The Web use mining (WUM) is a rather research field and it corresponds to the process of knowledge discovery from databases (KDD) applied to the Web usage data. It comprises three main stages : the pre-processing of raw data, the discovery of schemas and the analysis (or interpretation) of results. The quantity of the web usage data to be analysed and its low quality (in particular the absence of structure) are the principal problems in WUM. When applied to these data, the classic algorithms of data mining, generally, give disappointing results in terms of behaviours of the Web sites users (E.G. obvious sequential patterns, stripped of interest). In this thesis, we bring two significant contributions for a WUM process, both implemented in our toolbox, the Axislogminer. First, we propose a complete methodology for pre-processing the Web logs whose originality consists in its intersites aspect. We propose in our methodology four distinct steps : the data fusion, data cleaning, data structuration and data summarization. Our second contribution aims at discovering from a large pre-processed log file the minority behaviours corresponding to the sequential patterns with low support. For that, we propose a general methodology aiming at dividing the pre-processed log file into a series of sub-logs. Based on this methodology, we designed three approaches for extracting sequential patterns with low support (the sequential, iterative and hierarchical approaches). These approaches we implemented in hybrid concrete methods using algorithms of clustering and sequential pattern mining.