Web mining - is the application of data mining techniques to discover patterns from the Web. According to analysis targets, web mining can be divided into three different types, which are Web usage mining, Web content mining and Web structure mining.

Web usage mining
Web usage mining is the application that uses data mining to analyse and discover interesting patterns of user’s usage data on the web. The usage data records the user’s behaviour when the user browses or makes transactions on the web site. In order to better understand and serve the needs of users or Web-based applications. It is an activity that involves the automatic discovery of patterns from one or more Web servers. Organizations often generate and collect large volumes of data; most of this information is usually generated automatically by Web servers and collected in server log. Analyzing such data can help these organizations to determine the value of particular customers, cross marketing strategies across products and the effectiveness of promotional campaigns, etc.

The first web analysis tools simply provided mechanisms to report user activity as recorded in the servers. Using such tools, it was possible to determine such information as the number of accesses to the server, the times or time intervals of visits as well as the domain names and the URLs of users of the Web server. However, in general, these tools provide little or no analysis of data relationships among the accessed files and directories within the Web space. Now more sophisticated techniques for discovery and analysis of patterns are emerging. These tools fall into two main categories: Pattern Discovery Tools and Pattern Analysis Tools.

Web content mining
Web structure mining is the process of using graph theory to analyse the node and connection structure of a web site. According to the type of web structural data, web structure mining can be divided into two kinds.

The first kind of web structure mining is extracting patterns from hyperlinks in the web. A hyperlink is a structural component that connects the web page to a different location. The other kind of the web structure mining is mining the document structure. It is using the tree-like structure to analyse and describe the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) or XML (eXtensible Markup Language) tags within the web page.

Web structure mining
Web structure mining is the process of using graph theory to analyse the node and connection structure of a web site. According to the type of web structural data, web structure mining can be divided into two kinds.

The first kind of web structure mining is extracting patterns from hyperlinks in the web. A hyperlink is a structural component that connects the web page to a different location. The other kind of the web structure mining is mining the document structure. It is using the tree-like structure to analyse and describe the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) or XML (eXtensible Markup Language) tags within the web page.

Resources

• Jesus Mena, "Data Mining Your Website", Digital Press, 1999
• Soumen Chakrabarti, "Mining the Web: Analysis of Hypertext and Semi Structured Data", Morgan Kaufmann, 2002
• Advances in Web Mining and Web Usage Analysis 2005 - revised papers from 7 th workshop on Knowledge Discovery on the Web, Olfa Nasraoui, Osmar Zaiane, Myra Spiliopoulou, Bamshad Mobasher, Philip Yu, Brij Masand, Eds., Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, LNAI 4198, 2006
• Web Mining and Web Usage Analysis 2004 - revised papers from 6 th workshop on Knowledge Discovery on the Web, Bamshad Mobasher, Olfa Nasraoui, Bing Liu, Brij Masand, Eds., Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 2006