Analysis of Web‐usage behavior for focused Web sites: a case study
Mohammad El‐Ramly, Eleni Stroulia · Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution Research and Practice · 2004
Abstract The number of Web users and the diversity of their interests increase continuously; Web‐content providers seek to infer these interests and to adapt their Web sites to improve accessibility of the offered content. Usage‐pattern mining is a promising approach in support of this goal. Assuming that past navigation behavior is an indicator of the users' interests, then, Web‐server logs can be mined to infer what the users are interested in. On that basis, the Web site may be reorganized to make the interesting content more easily accessible or recommendations can be dynamically generated to help new visitors find information of interest faster. In this paper, we discuss a case study examining the effectiveness of sequential‐pattern mining for understanding the users' navigation behavior in focused Web sites. This study examines the Web site of an undergraduate course, as an example of a focused Web site that offers information intrinsically related to a process and closely reflects the workflow of this underlying process. We found that in such focused sites, indeed, visitor behavior reflects the process supported by the Web site and that sequential‐pattern mining can effectively predict Web‐usage behavior in these sites. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.