Conceptual user tracking

Abstract

Web usage mining applies data mining techniques to records of Web site visits. To better understand patterns of usage, analysis should take the semantics of visited URLs into account. This paper presents a framework for enhancing Web usage records with formal semantics based on an ontology underlying the site. Besides, it elicits automated methods of mapping URLs to application events. Using the ontology's taxonomy, we describe user actions at different levels of abstractions. Using the ontology's concepts and relations, we capture the multitude of user interests expressed by a visit to one page. We employ our ideas in an application of SEAL, a framework for semantic portals that uses Semantic Web technologies to support communities of interest. Different realizations of semantically enriched user tracking are discussed and related to other approaches. We describe first results from a prototypical system, and discuss benefits of Conceptual User Tracking for Web usage mining.