Web Mining is the application of data mining techniques to extract knowledge from web data i.e. web content, web structure, and web usage data. According to the type of data extraction, web mining is divided into three main types:
- Web content mining
- Web structure mining
- Web usage mining
Different types of Web Mining
1. Web Content Mining
- It is the process of extracting useful information from the contents of web documents.
- Content data corresponds to the collection of facts a web page was designed to convey to users.
- It may consist of text, images, audio, video, or structured records such as lists and tables.
- Web content has been the most widely researched. Issues addressed in text mining are topic discovery, extracting association patterns, clustering of web documents, and classification of web pages.
2. Web Structure Mining
- The structure of a typical web graph consists of web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges connecting related pages.
- It is the process of discovering structured information from the web.
- This can be further divided into two kinds based on the kind of structure information used:
- Hyperlinks: Intra-Document and Inter-Document hyperlinks.
- Document structure: Organized in a tree-structured format, based on various HTML, and XML tags within the page.
3. Web Usage Mining
- It is the application of data mining techniques to discover interesting usage patterns from web data, in order to understand and better serve the needs of web-based applications.
- Usage data captures the identity or origin of web users along with their browsing behavior at a website.
- Web usage mining itself can be classified further depending on the kind of usage data considered:
- Web server data
- Application server data
- Application level data
- Challenges:
- Too huge for effective data warehousing and data mining.
- Too complex and heterogeneous.
- Growing and changing rapidly.
- Broad diversity of user communities.
- Only a small portion of the information on the web is truly relevant or useful.
To learn more about Web Mining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_mining
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