Home

 Site Map Links Web Mining Information  Retrieval Glossary Bibliography
Web Structure Mining 


        
The          

        goal of Web structure mining is to generate structural summary about the          

        Web site and Web page. Technically,  Web content mining mainly focuses on          

        the structure of inner-document, while  Web structure mining tries to          

        discover the  link structure of the hyperlinks at the inter-document          

        level. Based on the topology of the hyperlinks, Web structure mining          

        will  categorize the Web pages and generate the information, such as the          

        similarity and relationship between different Web sites.
         

        
Web  

        structure mining can also have another direction -- discovering the  

        structure of Web document itself. This type of structure mining can be  

        used to reveal the structure (schema) of Web pages, this would be good  

        for navigation purpose and make it possible to compare/integrate Web  

        page schemes. This type of structure mining will facilitate introducing  

        database techniques for accessing information in Web pages by providing  

        a reference schema. The detailed works on it can be referred to [Madria 

        1999].


        
What  

        is on earth the structural information, and how to discover it? S.Madria  

        et al. [Madria 1999] gave a detailed description about how to discover  

        interesting and informative facts describing the connectivity in the Web  

        subset, based on the given collection of interconnected web documents.  

        The structural information generated from the Web structure mining  

        includes the follows: the information measuring the frequency of the  

        local links in the Web tuples in a Web table; the information measuring  

        the frequency of Web tuples in a Web table containing links that are  

        interior and the links that are within the same document; the  

        information measuring the frequency of Web tuples in a Web table that  

        contains links that are global and the links that span different Web  

        sites; the information measuring the frequency of identical Web tuples  

        that appear in the Web table or among the Web tables.
 

        
In 

        general, if a Web page is linked to another Web page directly, or the 

        Web pages are neighbors, we would like to discover the relationships 

        among those Web pages. The relations maybe fall in one of the types, 

        such as they related by synonyms or ontology, they may have similar 

        contents, both of them may sit in the same Web server therefore created 

        by the same person. Another task of Web structure mining is to discover 

        the nature of the hierarchy or network of hyperlink in the Web sites of 

        a particular domain. This may help to generalize the flow of information 

        in Web sites that may represent some particular domain, therefore the 

        query processing will be easier and more efficient.


        
Web   

        structure mining has a nature relation with the  Web content 

        mining,   

        since it is very likely that the Web documents contain links, and they   

        both use the real or primary data on the Web. It's quite often to   

        combine these two mining tasks in an application.