Effectively capturing user navigation paths in the web using web server logs

Authors:
Amithalal Caldera;Yogesh Deshpande
Affiliations:
School of Computing and Information Technology, College of Science, Technology and Engineering, University of Western Sydney, Penrith South DC, Australia;School of Computing and Information Technology, College of Science, Technology and Engineering, University of Western Sydney, Penrith South DC, Australia
Venue:
ICWE'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Web Engineering
Year:
2005

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Abstract

Most of the approaches to analyse the Web server logs to capture user access patterns are heuristic based and affected by the use of proxy servers, caching and stateless service model of the HTTP protocol. No heuristic has addressed all of these problems. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic to overcome this limitation. The heuristic exploits the background knowledge of user navigational behaviour recorded in the server logs without requiring additional information through cookies, logins and session ids. The heuristic is evaluated by analysing the logs of a university Web server that records user ids for administrative reasons, which allows us to compare it against the concrete knowledge of user sessions. We also evaluate our heuristic against some of the existing heuristics. The evaluation has shown very satisfactory result.