With the explosive growth of information available on the World Wide Web, it has become much more difficult to access relevant information from the Web. Various web services have been developed to assist users' web browsing activities. However, the existing web services provided are far from satisfactory to support the needs of different users. One possible solution to solve this problem is web personalization, which aims to customize the content and structure of a website to the needs of specific users by taking advantage of the knowledge acquired from the analysis of users' access behaviors. Discovering and understanding users' web access behaviors, especially surfing interests and habits, are very important for supporting effective web personalization. Web usage mining is a promising approach for discovering users' web access patterns from web usage logs. The objective of this research is to investigate novel web usage mining approaches for discovering users' web access patterns and effective techniques for web personalization. This research aims to investigate techniques for enhancing web usage mining in both access pattern representation and mining algorithms, and techniques for applying the discovered access patterns to support effective personalized services on the Web and Semantic Web. The contributions of this research are listed as follows: • An efficient sequential pattern mining algorithm, called CSB-mine (Conditional Sequence Base mining algorithm), is proposed for discovering frequent sequential patterns efficiently from sequence databases, especially the web usage logs. • A web recommender system, named SWARS (Sequential Web Access based Recommender System), is developed for matching a user's current access sequence efficiently and recommending related web pages to the user effectively based on the sequential access patterns mined by the proposed CSB-mine algorithm. • A web usage mining approach is proposed for discovering a specific kind of periodic association access patterns of individual users from web usage logs. The proposed approach incorporates fuzzy set theory into Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) for constructing a i ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library novel user behavior model, called Personal Web Usage Lattice, from which periodic association access patterns of the user can be extracted and visualized. • A Personal Web Usage Lattice based approach is proposed for periodic web personalization. Different from non-periodic approaches, the proposed periodic web personalization approach can determine efficiently which resources a user is most probably interested in during a given time period based on the Personal Web Usage Lattice of the user, without the use of the user's current access information. This makes it possible to perform more costly personalized resource preparation in advance rather than in real-time for periodic web personalization. • A semantic web personalization framework is proposed. In the propo...