Advances in Web Mining and Web Usage Analysis

This book contains the postworkshop proceedings with selected revised papers from the 8th international workshop on knowledge discovery from the Web, WEBKDD 2006. The WEBKDD workshop series has taken place as part of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) since 1999. The discipline of data mining delivers methodologies and tools for the an- ysis of large data volumes and the extraction of comprehensible and non-trivial insights from them. Web mining, a much younger discipline, concentrates on the analysisofdata pertinentto the Web.Web mining methods areappliedonusage data and Web site content; they strive to improve our understanding of how the Web is used, to enhance usability and to promote mutual satisfaction between e-business venues and their potential customers. Inthelastfewyears,theinterestfortheWebasamediumforcommunication, interaction and business has led to new challenges and to intensive, dedicated research.Many ofthe infancy problems in Web mining have been solvedby now, but the tremendous potential for new and improved uses, as well as misuses, of the Web are leading to new challenges. ThethemeoftheWebKDD2006workshopwas“KnowledgeDiscoveryonthe Web”, encompassing lessons learned over the past few years and new challenges for the years to come. While some of the infancy problems of Web analysis have beensolvedandproposedmethodologieshavereachedmaturity,therealityposes newchallenges:TheWebisevolvingconstantly;siteschangeanduserpreferences drift. And, most of all, a Web site is more than a see-and-click medium; it is a venue where a user interacts with a site owner or with other users, where group behavior is exhibited, communities are formed and experiences are shared.