Discovering user access patterns on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web provides its users with almost unlimited access to documents on the Internet. The use of intelligent agents is suggested to assist users to locate documents related to their interests instead of browsing the Web via primitive search engines. A number of key components in such intelligent systems are identified and a system architecture is proposed. In particular, a learning agent is designed along with the underlying algorithms for the discovery of areas of interest from user access logs. The discovered topics can be used to improve the efficiency of information retrieval by prefetching documents for the users and storing then in a document database in the system. A prototype system has also been implemented to illustrate the various concepts. Experiments are performed which show that the area of interest discovered can in fact be used to improve the efficiency of information retrieval on a distributed information system such as the Internet. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.