Concept of Web Usage Mining

Web mining is the use of data mining techniques to automatically discover and extract information from World Wide Web documents and services. This article considers the question: is effective Web mining possible? Skeptics believe that the Web is too unstructured for Web mining to succeed. Indeed, data mining has been applied to databases traditionally, yet much of the information on the Web lies buried in documents designed for human consumption such as home pages or product catalogs. Furthermore, much of the information on the Web is presented in natural language text with no machine-readable semantics; HTML annotations structure the display of Web pages, but provide little insight into their content. Some have advocated transforming the Web into a massive layered database to facilitate data mining, but the Web is too dynamic and chaotic to be tamed in this manner.