Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Web Mining and Visualization (InfoVis 9/2005) This issue of InfoVis discusses the use of visualization in web mining. Most examples are taken from commercial web sites, but it's clear that web mining tools could be valuably applied to course and learning object repositories to gain a better view about how users access and explore, and about how to improve the web structures of repositories: "... it's crucial to know the real structure of the web, its contents and the usage the customers make of it." ___JH ______ "Web mining can be defined as the integration of the information gathered by traditional data mining methods and techniques with information related to the web. In a simplified way we could say that it's data mining adapted to the particularities of the web." "Web mining is a discipline with an important potential. Despite the increasing and huge volume of existing web sites the proportion of them using web mining tools to analyse their structure, contents and usage in order to improve the service to the user and the profitability of the business is still low. On the other hand, web mining suffers from the same problems of the general excess of information: we need visualisation tools to enable us to digest and interpret the many results it provides." 8:23:53 AM    COMMENT []