A Preliminary Review on Web Usage Mining: A Web Mining Technique?

Web Mining is that area of Data Mining which deals with the extraction of interesting knowledge from the World Wide Web. There are three important areas in Web Mining: web content mining, web usage mining and web structure mining. Web content mining is the process of extracting knowledge from the content of documents or their descriptions. Web Usage Mining is that part of Web Mining which deals with the extraction of knowledge from server log files; source data mainly consist of the textual logs that are collected when users access Web servers and might be represented in standard formats, typical applications are those based on user modelling techniques, such as Web personalization, adaptive Web sites, and user modelling. Web Structure Mining mines the structure of hyperlinks within the web itself. This paper focuses on the concept of web usage mining WUM area which is a process of applying data mining techniques to discover interesting patterns from web usage data.