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Speaker:        Dr. Wilfred NG
                Assistant Professor
                Department of Computer Science
                Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Topic:          "Mining Trails from Web Log Data"

Date:           Monday, 12 November 2001

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F
                (Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater, near lift nos. 25/26)
                The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

ABSTRACT:

It is well-recognised that the growth of the World-Wide-Web (the WWW) is
creating difficulties for both users and web designers. In order to
customise the needs for a variety of users, a web site designer has to
maintain a complex structure of web pages and hyperlinks. On the other
hand, users can find it difficult to navigate a complicated web site.
Using the data contained from web server log files, we can identify user
navigation sessions and infer their trails. We model this set of trails as
a transition graph, which characterises the user interaction with the
visited web pages. We also compute the corresponding navigation matrix
based on the knowledge of the underlying web topology. In this seminar, we
will discuss a useful set of operators on navigation matrices, which
consists of the sum, union, intersection and difference. By using these
operations, a web site designer is able to analyse the contents of
navigation matrices in a formal manner and can therefore gain insights for
improving the web site. We will also discuss an adapted form of
association rules in the context of trail mining. Applying theses data
mining techniques we discover significant trails from the log data and
present them as useful guidance for web users. Finally, we will
demonstrate an application based on trails mined from a real web site.


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Biography:

Dr Wilfred S. H. Ng obtained his B.Sc.(Hon) degree and Postgraduate
Certificate of Education from the University of Hong Kong. He then
received his M.Sc.(Distinction) and Ph.D. degrees from the University of
London (UCL) in the U.K. His research interests are Databases and
Information Systems, which include semantic data modelling, data
warehousing, temporal databases, XML databases and web data mining. Prior
to joining the CS department of HKUST, Dr Ng has been a faculty member of
the Department of Computing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.


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