Visualizing and discovering web navigational patterns

Abstract

Web site structures are complex to analyze. Cross-referencing the web structure with navigational behaviour adds to the complexity of the analysis. However, this convoluted analysis is necessary to discover useful patterns and understand the navigational behaviour of web site visitors, whether to improve web site structures, provide intelligent on-line tools or offer support to human decision makers. Moreover, interactive investigation of web access logs is often desired since it allows ad hoc discovery and examination of patterns not a priori known. Various visualization tools have been provided for this task but they often lack the functionality to conveniently generate new patterns. In this paper we propose a visualization tool to visualize web graphs, representations of web structure overlaid with information and pattern tiers. We also propose a web graph algebra to manipulate and combine web graphs and their layers in order to discover new patterns in an ad hoc manner.

Visualizing e-Government portal and its performance in WEBVS

“…In [4], the Web Knowledge Visualization and Discovery System (WEBKVDS) is mainly composed of two parts: a) FootPath: for visualizing the web structure with the different data and pattern layers; b) Web Graph Algebra: for manipulating and operating on the web graph objects for visual data mining. The authors presented the idea of layering data and patterns in distinct layers on top of a disktree representation of the web structure, allowing the display of information in context which is more suited for the interpretation of discovered patterns.…”

Fine-Grained Analysis of Web Tasks through Data Visualization

“…Chi [10] used this approach for discovering usability defects in Web sites. Chen et al [11] have improved this method by introducing operations and by describing a web graph algebra to manipulate and combine web graphs.…”

Visualization of Heterogeneous Data

“…The visualization of unstructured data, such as documents, webpages, and tags, is studied in several papers [14,17,13,15]. For structured data, Catarci et al [12] surveyed a large number of systems that visualize relational data.…”