IMPACT: International Journal of Research in

Engineering & Technology (IMPACT: IJRET)

ISSN(E): 2321-8843; ISSN(P): 2347-4599
Vol. 3, Issue 10, Oct 2015, 27-34
Impact Journals

A SURVEY ON WEB MINING TOOLS

KALPANA WANI, ARCHANA SHIRKE & PARIMITA DAS
Assistant Professor, Department of IT, Fr. C. R. I. T Vashi, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

ABSTRACT
Aim of this paper is to study and analyze different Web Mining Tools and techniques used to mine the
information from World Wide Web. This survey will provide the detail information of different web mining
tool/techniques for Web Content Mining, Web Structure Mining and Web Usage Mining, as well as a comparative study of
their advantages and disadvantages.

KEYWORDS: Search Agent, Personalized Web Agents, Web Usage Mining, Web Content Mining, Web Structure
Mining

I. INTRODUCTION
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a vast resource of multiple types of information in varied formats which is very
useful for the analysis of business progress, which is very important now a days to stand in the competition of business.
Researchers are beginning to investigate human behavior in this distributed Web data warehouse and are trying to build
models for understanding human behavior in virtual environments. Data mining, often called Web mining when applied to
the Internet, is a process of extracting hidden predictive information and discovering meaningful patterns, profiles, and
trends from large databases. Web mining is an iterative process of discovering knowledge and is proving to be a valuable
strategy for understanding consumer and business activity on the Web. Basically there are three sub categories for mining
web information. These sub categories are

Web Content Mining

Web Structure Mining

Web Usage Mining

A. Web Content Mining

The Web content mining refers to the discovery of useful information from web contents which include text,
image, audio, video, etc. The mining of link structure aims at developing techniques to take advantage of the collective
judgment of web page quality which is available in the form of hyperlinks that is web structure mining [2]. It includes
extraction of structured data/information from web pages, identification, similarity and integration of datas with similar
meaning, view extraction from online sources, and concept hierarchy, knowledge incorporation [1].
Web Content Mining Strategies: A. Web Content Mining Approaches:
Two approaches used in web content mining are Agent based approach and database approach. The three types of
agents they are
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Intelligent search agents

Information filtering/Categorizing agent,

Personalized web agents

Intelligent Search agents automatically searches for information according to a particular query using domain

characteristics and user profiles. Information agents used number of techniques to filter data according to the predefine
information. Adapted web agents learn user preferences and discovers documents related to those user profiles. In
Database approach it consists of well formed database containing schemas and attributes with defined domains.
Web content mining has the following approaches to mine data

Unstructured text mining,

Structured mining,

Semi structured text mining, and

Multimedia mining.

1. Unstructured Text Data Mining:

Most of the Web content data is of unstructured text data. Content mining requires application of data mining and
text mining techniques [4]. The research around applying data mining techniques to unstructured text is termed Knowledge
Discovery in Texts (KDT), or text data mining, or text mining. Some of the techniques used in text mining are

Information Extraction,

Topic Tracking

Summarization

Categorization

Clustering

Information Visualization

2. Structured Data Mining

The Structured data on the Web represents their host pages. Structured data is easier to extract when compared to
unstructured texts. The techniques used for mining structured data are

Web Crawler

Wrapper Generation,

Page content Mining.

3. Semi-Structured Data Mining

Semi-structured data evolving from rigidly structured relational tables with numbers and strings to enable the
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29

natural representation of complex real world objects without sending the application writer into contortions. HTML is a
special case of such intra-document structure. The techniques used for semi structured data mining are

Object Exchange Model (OEM),

Top down Extraction

Web Data Extraction language

4. Multimedia Data Mining

The techniques of Multimedia data mining are:

SKICAT

Color Histogram Matching

Multimedia Miner

Shot Boundary Detection.

B. Web Structure Mining

Web structure mining is based on the link structures with or without the description of links. Markov chain model
can be used to categorize web pages and is useful to generate information such as similarity and relationship between
different websites. The goal of web structure mining is to generate structured summary about websites and web pages. It
uses treelike structure to analyze and describe HTML or XML. Some algorithms have been proposed to model the Web
topology such as HITS, PageRank and improvements of HITS by adding content information to the links structure and by
using outlier filtering . These models are mainly applied as a method to calculate the quality rank or relevancy of each Web
page. Some examples are the Clever system and Google . Some other applications of the models include Web pages
categorization and discovering micro communities on the Web.
C. Web Usage Mining
The Web usage mining is also known as Web Log mining, which is used to analyze the behavior of website users.
This focuses on technique that can be used to predict the user behavior while user interacts with the web. It also uses the
secondary data on the web where the activity involves automatic discovery of user access patterns from one or more web
servers. It contains four processing stages including

Data collection

Preprocessing

Pattern discovery and Analysis

Data Collection
The data collection is the discovery of hidden information and usage pattern trends, which could aid the Web
managers for improving the management, performance and controlling of the Web servers.

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Data Preprocessing
The selection of useful data is an important task in the data pre-processing stage. The datas were selected in each
data type to generate the cluster models for finding web user access and server usage patterns. The removal of irrelevant
and noisy data is an initial step in this task. The most recently accessed data were indexed with higher value of time index
while the least recently accessed data were placed at the bottom with lowest value . This becomes the critical step to obtain
more precise analysis result due to time dependence characteristics of Web usage data.
Data Clustering
The method of clustering is broadly used in different projects by researchers for finding the usage patterns or user
profiles. The clustering algorithms become the most mining method in websites and the cluster objects include user groups
(to describe user actions) and web pages.
Pattern Discovery and Analysis
Using this pattern discovery and pattern analysis, relevant and useful information can be easily predicted based on
data analysis and Graph. Web usages data includes data from web server access, proxy server and browser logs, user
profiles, sessions or transactions, queries, registration data, cookies, bookmark data, mouse clicks and scrolls or any other
data as result of interaction. Analysis of web access logs for web sites can help understand the user behavior and also its
web structure, thus improving the design of this massive collection of resources. There are two tendencies in Web Usage
Mining driven by the applications of the discoveries: General Access Pattern Tracking and Customized Usage Tracking .

II. WEB MINING TOOLS

As we have seen web mining having sub categories as Web Content Mining, Web Structure Mining, Web Usage
Mining. For these different categories there are different tools available for mining the data. We will see tools of these
different categories one by one.
A. Web Content Mining Tool [2]
i) Web Info Extractor
This tool is helpful in mining web data, extracting web content, and monitoring content update. Thorny template
rules are not required to be defined.
ii) Mozenda
To extract web data easily and to manage it affordably Mozenda is useful. With Mozenda, users can set up agents
that regularly extract, store and circulate data to several destinations. Once information is in the Mozenda systems users
can repurpose, format, and mash up the data to be used in other online/offline applications or as intelligence.
iii) Screen-Scraper
Screen-scraper allows mining the content from the web, like searching a database, SQL server or SQL database,
which interfaces with the software, to achieve the content mining requirements. The programming languages like Java,
.NET, PHP, Visual Basic and Active Server Pages (ASP) can also be used to access screen scraper.

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31

iv) Web Content Extractor

Most powerful and easy to use data extraction tool for web scraping, data mining or data retrieval from the
internet is Web Content Extractor.
v) Automation Anywhere7
Automation anywhere is a web data extraction tool used for retrieving web data effortlessly, screen scrape from
web pages or use it for web mining.
Commonalities and Differences between the Above Tools

Commonalities
All the tools automate the business task and retrieve the web data in an efficient way.

Differences

Screen-scrapper needs prior knowledge of proxy server and some knowledge of HTML and HTTP where as
other tools do not require any such knowledge and it need Internet connection to run.

Automation-Anywhere 7 allows recording of actions this facility is not provided in the other tools.

Though we have setup file, Mozenda will not allow us to install without Internet connection, thi is not the
case with other tools.

B. Web Structure Mining[3]

There are some possible tasks of link mining which are applicable in Web structure mining and are described as
follows:
1. Link-Based Classification
Is the most recent upgrade of a classic data mining task to linked Domains. The task is to focus on the prediction
of the category of a web page, based on words that occur on the page, links between pages, anchor text, html tags and other
possible attributes found on the web page.
2. Link-Based Cluster Analysis
The goal in cluster analysis is to find naturally occurring sub-classes. The data is segmented into groups, where
similar objects are grouped together, and dissimilar objects are grouped into different groups. Different than the previous
task, link-based cluster analysis is unsupervised and can be used to discover hidden patterns from data.
3. Link Type
There are a wide range of tasks concerning the prediction of the existence of links, such as predicting the type of
link between two entities, or predicting the purpose of a link.
4. Link Strength
Links could be associated with weights.

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5. Link Cardinality
The main task here is to predict the number of links between objects. There are some uses of web structure mining
like it is:

Used to rank the users query

Deciding what page will be added to the collection

Page categorization

Finding related pages

Finding duplicated web sites

To find out similarity between them Many authors have proposed web structure mining algorithms like: Page rank
algorithm, weighted page rank algorithm, Hyper Induced Topic search algorithm, weighted Topic sensitive page
rank algorithm. In next section we will explain these algorithms in detail.
C. Web Usage Mining[1]
There are different task to be carry out in Web Usage Mining that are given below and different tools are used for
that work..
i) Data Preprocessing
The first step of Web Usage Mining is preprocessing of data stored in web logs as it is noisy in nature. The
process of converting usage, content and structure information into data abstraction is described in preprocessing. The
processing of preprocessing consists of four phases: data cleaning, session reconstruction, content and structure
information retrieval and data abstraction.
ii) Usage Preprocessing
This is considered as most difficult task of web usage mining because of presence of incomplete and inconsistent
data in server log. Only IP address, agent and server side click stream are available to identify users and server sessions
which faces many problems like single IP address/multiple server sessions, multiple IP address/single server session,
multiple IP address/single user and multiple agent/single user. Usage preprocessing also encountered the problem of
inferring cached page references.
Iii) Content Preprocessing
Content preprocessing concerned with transforming unstructured and semi structured documents into the forms
that are suitable for web usage mining.
iv) Discovery Pattern Discovery
It focuses on to uncover patterns from the abstractions produced as a result of preprocessing phase. It focuses on
applying various methods and techniques developed from several fields such as data mining, machine learning, statistics
and pattern recognition. Discovery of desired patterns and to extract understandable knowledge from them is a challenging

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A Survey on Web Mining Tools

task. This section explains some of algorithms

v) Pattern Analysis
The last step of web usage mining process is pattern analysis. This phase separates the interesting and
uninteresting patterns from the overall patterns discovered during pattern discovery phase.
Table 1: Tools Used in Various Stages of Web Usage Mining
Tools
Data
Preparator
Sumatra TT
Lisp Miner
Speed
Tracer

SewebarCms

i-Miner

Argunaut
MiDas(Mini
ng Internet
Data for
Associative
Sequences)
Webalizer

Naviz

WebViz
Web Miner
Stratdyn

Features
Data Pre-Processing Tools
Performs cleaning, extraction and
transformation of data before pattern
discovery.
Platform independent data transformation
tool. Based on Sumatra script and support
Rapid application Development
Performs data pre-processing by analysing
the click stream and data collected.
Mines web server logs and reconstruct the
user navigational path for session
identification
Pattern Discovery Tools
Provides interaction between data analyst
and domain expert to perform discovery of
patterns. Helps in selection of rules among
various rules in association rule mining [34].
Discover data cluster by using fuzzy
clustering algorithm and fuzzy inference
system for pattern discovery and analysis
[33]
Develop the patterns of useful data by using
sequence of various rules.
Discover marketing based navigational
pattern from log files. It applies more
features to traditional sequential method.
Pattern Analysis Tools
GNU GPL license based and produces web
pages after analyzing patterns.
Visualization tool that combines 2-D graph
of visitor access and grouping of related
pages. It describes the pattern of user
navigation on the web.
Analyze the patterns and provides them in
the form of graphical patterns
Mines the useful patterns and provides the
user specific information
Enhances WUM and provides visualization
of patterns

III. CONCLUSIONS
This paper described several tool/techniques for Web Content Mining, Web Structure Mining and Web Usage
Mining. We analyzed their strengths and limitations and provide comparison among them. So we can say that this paper
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Kalpana Wani, Archana Shirke & Parimita Das

may be used as a reference by researchers when deciding which tool/techniques are suitable.

IV. REFERENCES
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Kamika Chaudhary, Santosh Kumar Gupta, Web Usage Mining Tools & Techniques: A Survey in International
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V. Bharanipriya & V. Kamakshi Prasad, Web Content Mining tools: A Comparative Study in International
Journal of Information Technology and Knowledge Management January-June 2011, Volume 4, No. 1, pp. 211215.

3.

Preeti Chopra, Md. Ataullah, a Survey on Improving the Efficiency of Different Web Structure Mining
Algorithms in International Journal of Engineering and Advanced Technology (IJEAT) ISSN: 2249 8958,
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Zhang, Q., Segall, R.S., Web Mining: A Survey of Current Research, Techniques, and Software, International
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Darshna Navadiya, Roshni Patel, Web Content Mining Techniques-A Comprehensive Survey, International
Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) Vol. 1 Issue 10, December- 2012 ISSN: 2278-0181.

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Mozenda, http://www.mozenda.com/web-mining-software Viewed 18 February 2013.

7.

Web Content Extractor help. WCE, http://www.newprosoft.com/webcontent-extractor.htm Viewed 18 February

2013. [31] Screen-scraper, http://www.screen-scraper.com Viewed 19 February 2013.

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Automation Anywhere Manual. AA, http://www.automationanywhere.com Viewed 06 February 2013.

Index Copernicus Value: 3.0 - Articles can be sent to [email protected]