Designing and Mining Web Applications: A Conceptual Modeling Approach

Abstract

In this Chapter we present the usage of a modeling language, WebML, for the design and the management of dynamic Web applications. WebML also makes easier the analysis of the usage of the application contents by the users, even if applications are dynamic. In fact, it makes use of some special-purpose logs, called conceptual logs, generated by the application runtime engine. In this Chapter we report on a case study about the analysis of the conceptual logs for testifying to the effectiveness of WebML and of its conceptual modeling methods. The methodology of analysis of Web logs is based on the data mining paradigm of itemsets and frequent patterns and makes full use of constraints on the conceptual logs content. As a consequence, we could obtain many interesting patterns for the application management such as recurrent navigation paths, the most frequently visited page contents, and anomalies.