Web Mining

What Does Web Mining Mean?

Web mining is the process of using data mining techniques and algorithms to extract information directly from the Web by extracting it from Web documents and services, Web content, hyperlinks and server logs. The goal of Web mining is to look for patterns in Web data by collecting and analyzing information in order to gain insight into trends, the industry and users in general.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Web Mining

Web mining is a branch of data mining concentrating on the World Wide Web as the primary data source, including all of its components from Web content, server logs to everything in between. The contents of data mined from the Web may be a collection of facts that Web pages are meant to contain, and these may consist of text, structured data such as lists and tables, and even images, video and audio.

Categories of Web mining:

  • Web content mining — This is the process of mining useful information from the contents of Web pages and Web documents, which are mostly text, images and audio/video files. Techniques used in this discipline have been heavily drawn from natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval.
  • Web structure mining — This is the process of analyzing the nodes and connection structure of a website through the use of graph theory. There are two things that can be obtained from this: the structure of a website in terms of how it is connected to other sites and the document structure of the website itself, as to how each page is connected.
  • Web usage mining — This is the process of extracting patterns and information from server logs to gain insight on user activity including where the users are from, how many clicked what item on the site and the types of activities being done on the site.
Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Data Management Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…