WEB USER IDENTIFICATION: A REVIEW OF APPROACHES AND ISSUES

Web usage mining has become a popular research area, used for capturing web user interests. This information can be used for several purposes such as web structure enhancement, web navigation prediction, web personalization etc. One of the key issues in the web mining is to identify web users. Identifying users based on web log files is a straightforward problem, thus various methods have been developed. There are several difficulties that have to be overcome, such as client side caching, changing and shared IP addresses and so on. This paper presents three different methods for identifying web users. As a consequence, a mass number of systems have been developed. In these systems, the available personal information about a user such as user's preferences, user's state is stored. We discuss some algorithms for user identification for the purpose of web personalization so that World Wide Web sites on a given topic would be interesting to a user.