A Survey on Web Usage Mining, Applications and Tools

Abstract

World Wide Web is a vast collection of unstructured web documents like text, images, audio, video or Multimedia content.  As web is growing rapidly with millions of documents, mining the data from the web is a difficult task. To mine various patterns from the web is known as Web mining. Web mining is further classified as content mining, structure mining and web usage mining. Web usage mining is the data mining technique to mine the knowledge of usage of web data from World Wide Web. Web usage mining extracts useful information from various web logs i.e. users usage history. This is useful for better understanding and serve the people for better web applications. Web usage mining not only useful for the people who access the documents from the World Wide Web, but also it useful for many applications like e-commerce to do personalized marketing, e-services, the government agencies to classify threats and fight against terrorism, fraud detection, to identify criminal activities, the companies can establish better customer relationship and can improve their businesses by analyzing the people buying strategies etc. This paper is going to explain in detail about web usage mining and how it is helpful. Web Usage Mining has seen rapid increase towards research and people communities.