Models for User Access Patterns on the Web: Semantic Content versus Access History.

This paper focuses on clustering a World Wide Web site (i.e., the 1998 World Cup Soccer site) into groups of documents that are predictive of future user accesses. Two approaches were developed and tested. The first approach uses semantic information inherent in the documents to facilitate the clustering process. User access history is then used to reorganize the clusters to better indicate access patterns. This method was found not to be an effective solution to the problem. Hence a second method based on hierarchical clustering of trail information was developed. This method is shown to be far more effective than the first method. (Contains 11 references.) (MES)