Mining user access logs to optimize navigational structure of adaptive web sites

Abstract

Web sites may contain numerous documents. Using some web techniques, it's possible to analyze users' data about using resources, contents of those documents and structure of web sites. Adaptive web sites automatically change their structure and representation based on visitor's behavior. Shortcutting is an approach that enables connecting two documents which has never been connected before. Most of existing approaches enables connecting the first and the last document in user's navigation path, not considering the possibility that some of the documents within the navigation path might contain useful information for reaching intended document. These documents, which are positioned within user's navigation path, are called wayposts, and they may contain useful information that can help users to get to the specific "target" document. The goal of this paperwork is to discuss about all the possibilities of identifying those waypost documents in users' navigation paths and to propose an optimization of navigation structure of a web site based on users' navigation paths, initial and target documents. ©2010 IEEE.