Web usage mining - Languages and algorithms

Web Usage Mining deals with the discovery of interesting information from user navigational patterns from web logs. While extracting simple information from web logs is easy, mining complex structural information is very challenging. Data cleaning and preparation constitute a very significant effort before mining can even be applied. We propose two new XML applications, XGMML and LOGML to help us in this task. XGMML is a graph description language and LOGML is a web-log report description language. We generate a web graph in XGMML format for a web site and generate web-log reports in LOGML format for a web site from web log files and the web graph. We show the simplicity with which mining algorithms can be specified and implemented efficiently using our two XML applications.