Data Collection in Web Usage Mining

The first step in the Web usage mining process consists of collecting the relevant Web data, which will be analyzed to provide useful information about the users’ behavior. There are two main sources of data for Web usage mining, corresponding to the two software systems interacting during a Web session: data on the Web server side and data on the client side. In addition, when intermediaries are introduced in the client–server communication, they can also become sources for usage data, like proxy servers and packet sniffers. We will consider each of these sources in the following paper. Also we are trying to associate the data collection methods with the requirements imposed by different classes of personalization functions.