As the popularity of the World Wide Web continues to increase, there is
a growing need to develop tools and techniques that will help improve
its overall usefulness. Since one of the principal goals of the Web is
to act as a world-wide distributed information resource, a number
of efforts are underway to develop techniques that will make it more
useful in this regard. The term Web mining has been used to refer
to different kinds of techniques that encompass a broad range of issues.
However, while meaningful and attractive, this very broadness has caused
Web mining to mean different things to different people [HFW
96,MJHS96], and there is a need to develop a common vocabulary for all
these efforts. Towards this goal, in this paper we proposed a definition
of Web mining, and developed a taxonomy of the various ongoing efforts
related to it. Then we presented an brief survey of the research in
this area. Next, we concentrated on the aspect of Web mining which focuses
on issues related to understanding the behavior of Web users, called
Web usage mining. We provided a detailed survey of the efforts in
this area, even though the survey is short because of the area's
newness. We provided a general architecture of a system to do
Web usage mining, and identified some of the issues and problems in
this area that may require further research and development.