Combining SOMs and Ontologies for Effective Web Site Mining

Abstract

The Internet since the late 90s, when it became mainstream, has dramatically changed the way people work, communicate, get educated, socialize and stay informed about current affairs. According to WorldWideWebSize.com (WorldWideWebSize.com, 2010) the Indexed Web contains at least 14.56 billion pages as of August 2010. The estimated minimal size of indexed World Wide Web is based on the estimations of the numbers of pages indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo Search and Ask. In addition according to Royal Pingdom (Royal Pingdom, 2009) on December 2009 there were 234 million web sites and on September 2009 1.73 billion Internet users. In the past few years we have also witnessed a new explosion in the usage of the World Wide Web (WWW) with what is commonly referred to as Web 2.0. The term Web 2.0 refers to the set of web sites whose contents are modified by visitor contributions and not only by the webmaster. This includes social networks such as Facebook (Facebook), LinkedIn (LinkedIn), Twitter (Twitter), MySpace (MySpace) as well as blogs and web sites where visitors can share pictures, such as Picasa (Picasa), or video files, such as YouTube (YouTube). The WWW has become an extremely interactive form of communication. The following statistics from Royal Pingdom (Royal Pingdom, 2009) illustrate the rapid penetration of Social Media Networks to everyday life: • 126 million – the number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse) • 27.3 million – the number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009) • 350 million – people on Facebook • 50% percentage of Facebook users that log in every day • 500,000 – the number of Facebook applications Bearing in mind these huge numbers it is easy to image the massive amount of information available on the World Wide Web. On the other hand significant advances in networking technology (such as very fast Internet connections) and search engines have created an impatient Internet culture. Internet users expect to be able to find the information they seek within seconds. Accessing the Internet is no longer an extracurricular activity that people perform at their spare time at home or a business tool used only by large corporations. It has become a common part of our everyday life. Many people have always an Internet connection available to them in their office and home equipment as well as through mobile devices.