|
| |
Nan Niu, Eleni Stroulia, Mohammad El-Ramly,
Understanding Web Usage for Effective Dynamic Web-Site Adaptation.
Abstract
Every day, more information, new products and more
valuable services are being offered by providers on
the World Wide Web. Similarly, the number of
consumers increase and their interests become
increasingly varied. As a result, consumers have
regularly trouble finding what they want and
providers are seeking ways to determine the
customers' interests in order to better target their
products to the most relevant audience. In this paper,
we discuss our approach to understanding the
customers' interests and to dynamically adapting the
organization of the information provided by a Web
site to match these interests. Our approach is tailored
to fairly "focused" sites that offer information on a
well-defined subject. The basic intuition is that users
of such focused sites share common interests which
fundamentally dictate their behavior when accessing
the site in question. It is therefore possible, by
understanding the usage patterns of the site visitors,
to generate run-time recommendations so that
information of interest to many early visitors
becomes more easily accessible to subsequent
visitors. Thus the Web site monitors the page-access
behavior of its visitors to extract frequently followed
patterns and then uses the extracted patterns to
dynamically adapt its content for subsequent visitors
who seem to exhibit similar behavior. A fundamental
novelty of our approach is that the usage patterns, on
the basis of which the Web-site is adapted, are
updated frequently and are sensitive both to changes
in the Web-site material and in the behavior of its
visitors. We have applied our method to a university-
course Web site with encouraging results.
|
