WUM: A tool for Web Utilization analysis

The navigational behaviour of users in the web is essential for the providers of information, services and goods. Search engines can help a user find a provider of interest, but it is the proper organization of the provider's site that stimulates the user's propensity to consume. To verify whether the site is effectively organized, knowledge on the navigation patterns occuring during visits to the site must be obtained. Our Web Utilization Miner WUM can assist in obtaining this knowledge. WUM is a mining system for the discovery of navigation patterns. A navigation pattern is a directed graph that summarizes the traversal movements of a group of visitors and satisfies certain human-centric criteria that make it interesting. Instead of focussing the mining process on the statistically dominant but not always interesting patterns, WUM supports the specification of interestingness criteria on their structure, content and statistics. WUM provides a declarative mining language, MINT, with which the human expert can specify interestingness criteria on the fly. To discover the navigation patterns satisfying the expert's criteria, WUM exploits an innovative aggregated storage representation for the information in the web server log.