Web mining: Past, present and future

Web mining can be broadly defined as the automated discovery and analysis of useful information from the web documents and services using data mining techniques. It is a large, interdisciplinary and dynamic scientific area, converging from several research communities such as database, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence. The purpose of this paper is to report the most representative scientific activities in the three main categories of web mining (content, structure and usage mining), investigate the foreseen future directions, and outline the new and enticing challenges to be answered in the years to come.