What is Web Usage Mining

As a sub-field of data mining, Web usage mining focuses specifically on finding patterns relating to users of a Web based system: who they are, what they tend to do, etc. In contrast, other types of Web data mining (e.g., Web text mining) might focus on finding patterns in the content itself. Web usage mining relies on data captured behind the scene in server logs and databases.

Based on the interaction of Internet-users with Web sites, Web usage mining copes with the identification of commercially valuable information in order to create personalized Web-pages or provide enhanced search engines.

Extracting useful information from the Web usage statistics.

It is defined as the application of data mining techniques to extract the patterns of information from web log data.

Set of techniques to generate patterns and discover knowledge from the web usage data.

Harvesting and processing data for the purpose of uncovering usage and navigation patterns of Web users. This is usually recognized as a sub-category of Web Mining . The additional elements of this broader term are Web Content Mining and Web Structure Mining . These focus, respectively, on the information content of Web documents, and on the hyperlink structure among Web documents.

An application of data mining methodologies to Web access logs in order to discover trends and regularities in navigation patterns of Web users.

With the growing popularity of the World Wide Web, large volumes of data such as the user’s address or requested URLs are automatically gathered by Web servers and stored in access log files (access log, error log …). Analysis of such files in order to understand user behavior is called Web usage mining and can provide useful information to improve a network’s performance, to rebuild a Web site dynamically, or even to target customers in an e-business environment.

The branch of Web mining that refers to the study of way of use for a Website.