Mining information and knowledge from large databases has been recognized by many researchers as a key research topic in database systems and machine learning, and by many industrial companies as an important area with an opportunity of major revenues. Researchers in many different fields have shown great interest in data mining. Several emerging applications in information providing services, such as data warehousing and on-line services over the Internet, also call for various data mining techniques to better understand user behavior, to improve the service provided, and to increase the business opportunities. In response to such a demand, this article is to provide a survey, from a database researcher's point of view, on the data mining techniques developed recently. A classification of the available data mining techniques is provided and a comparative study of such techniques is presented.

This paper presents the results of a study conducted at Georgia Institute of Technology that captured client-side user events of NCSA's XMosaic. Actual user behavior, as determined from clientside log file analysis, supplemented our understanding of user navigation strategies as well as provided real interface usage data. Log file analysis also yielded design and usability suggestions for WWW pages, sites and browsers. The methodology of the study and findings are discussed along with future research directions. Keywords Hypertext Navigation, Log Files, User Modeling Introduction With the prolific growth of the World-Wide Web (WWW) [Berners-Lee et.al, 1992] in the past year there has been an increased demand for an understanding of the WWW audience. Several studies exist that determine demographics and some behavioral characteristics of WWW users via selfselection [Pitkow and Recker 1994a & 1994b]. Though highly informative, such studies only provide high level trends in Web use (e...

Abstract—In this paper, we explore a new data mining capability that involves mining path traversal patterns in a distributed information-providing environment where documents or objects are linked together to facilitate interactive access. Our solution procedure consists of two steps. First, we derive an algorithm to convert the original sequence of log data into a set of maximal forward references. By doing so, we can filter out the effect of some backward references, which are mainly made for ease of traveling and concentrate on mining meaningful user access sequences. Second, we derive algorithms to determine the frequent traversal patterns¦i.e., large reference sequences¦from the maximal forward references obtained. Two algorithms are devised for determining large reference sequences; one is based on some hashing and pruning techniques, and the other is further improved with the option of determining large reference sequences in batch so as to reduce the number of database scans required. Performance of these two methods is comparatively analyzed. It is shown that the option of selective scan is very advantageous and can lead to prominent performance improvement. Sensitivity analysis on various parameters is conducted. Index Terms—Data mining, traversal patterns, distributed information system, World Wide Web, performance analysis.

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The World-Wide Web is becoming an invaluable source for the information needs of many users. However, current browsers are still primitive, in that they do not support many of the navigation needs of users, as indicated by user studies. They do not provide an overview and a sense of location in the information structure being browsed. Also they do not facilitate organization and filtering of information nor aid users in accessing already visited pages without high cognitive demands. In this paper, a new browsing interface is proposed with multiple hierarchical windows and efficient multiple window operations. It provides a flexible environment where users can quickly organize, filter, and restructure the information on the screen as they reformulate their goals. Overviews can give the user a sense of location in the browsing history as well as provide fast access to a hierarchy of pages.

A search tactic is a set of search moves that are temporally and semantically related. The current study examined the tactics of medical students searching a factual database in microbiology. The students answered problems and searched the database on three occasions over a 9-month period. Their search moves were analyzed in terms of the changes in search terms used from one cycle to the next, using two different analysis methods. Common patterns were found in the students ’ search tactics; the most common approach was the specification of a concept, followed by the addition of one or more concepts, gradually narrowing the retrieved set before it was displayed. It was also found that the search tactics changed over time as the students ’ domain knowledge changed. These results have important implications for designers in developing systems that will support users ’ preferred ways of formulating searches. In addition, the research methods used (the coding scheme and the two data analysis methods—zero-order state transition matrices and maximal repeating patterns [MRP] analysis) are discussed in terms of their validity in future studies of search tactics.

As Internet services based on the World-Wide Web become more popular, information overload has become a pressing research problem. Difficulties with search on Internet will worsen as the amount of online information increases. A scalable approach to Internet search is critical to the success of Internet services and other current and future National Information Infrastructure (NII) applications. As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this research proposes an intelligent personal spider (agent) approach to Internet searching. The approach, which is grounded on automatic textual analysis and general-purpose search algorithms, is expected to be an improvement over the current static and inefficient Internet searches. In this experiment, we implemented Internet personal spiders based on best first search and genetic algorithm techniques. These personal spiders can dynamically take a user's selected starting homepages and search for the most closely related hom...

Movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many hypermedia resources (websites); and key to good mobility is context and preview by probing. This is especially the case for visually impaired users when a hypertext anchor is inaccurately described or is described out of context. This means confusion and disorientation. Mobility is similarly reduced when the link target of the anchor has no relationship to the expected information present on the hypertext node (web-page). We suggest that confident movement with purpose, ease, and accuracy can only be achieved when complete contextual information and an accurate description of the proposed destination (preview) are available. Our past work (1) deriving mobility heuristics from mobility models, (2) transforming web-pages based on these heuristics, and (3) building tools to analyse and access these transformed pages; has shown us that a tool to expand context and preview would be useful. In this paper we describe the development of such a middleware tool to automatically and dynamically annotate web-pages with additional context information present within the page, and preview information present within hypertext link destinations found on the page.

In spite of the radical enhancement of Web technologies, many users still continue to experience severe difficulties in navigating Web systems. One way to reduce the navigation difficulties is to provide context information that explains the current situation of Web users. In this study, we empirically examined the effects of 2 types of context information, structural and temporal context. In the experiment, we evaluated the effectiveness of the contextual navigation aids in 2 different types of Web systems, an electronic commerce system that has a well-defined structure and a content dissemination system that has an ill-defined structure. In our experiment, participants answered a set of postquestionnaires after performing several searching and browsing tasks. The results of the experiment reveal that the 2 types of contextual navigation aids significantly improved the performance of the given tasks regardless of different Web systems and different task types. Moreover, context information changed the users’ navigation patterns and increased their subjective convenience of navigation. This study concludes with implications for understanding the users ’ searching and browsing patterns and for developing effective navigation systems. 1.

A high quality of free movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many `common-use' hypermedia resources (Web sites) and key to good mobility is context and preview. This is especially the case when a hypertext anchor is inaccurately described or is described out of context as confusion and disorientation can ensue. Mobility is similarly reduced when the link target of the anchor has no relationship to the expected information present on the hypertext node (Web page). Confident movement with purpose, ease, and accuracy can only be achieved when complete contextual information and an accurate description of the proposed destination (preview) are available. We suggest that sighted people can benefit from additional context and preview information included in hyperlinks and disprove the empirical evidence that suggests these users do not benefit from link descriptions which have this enhanced information. We briefly describe a middleware system to automatically expand context and preview in link descriptions thereby `fixing' terse links, links out of context, and inaccurate or inadequate preview information. Finally, we conduct a formative evaluation which shows us that a system to expand context and preview would be useful in different ways depending on the type of link.