2736 | International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.4, No.4 (Aug 2014) Review Article International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology E-ISSN 2277 – 4106, P-ISSN 2347 - 5161 ©2014 INPRESSCO ® , All Rights Reserved Available at http://inpressco.com/category/ijcet A Summarized Review on Web Usage Mining Tayyaba Ashraf Ȧ* and Imran Ashraf Ȧ Ȧ IT Department, University of Gujrat, Gujrat Pakistan Accepted 10 August 2014, Available online 25 Aug 2014, Vol.4, No.4 (Aug 2014) Abstract Incremental growth in the use of web based services and systems have led to generation of such tremendous amounts of data which is beyond imagining. This data plays a vital role in determining the factors like user’s interests, priorities and product or services usage trends. This knowledge enables organizations to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies and quality of services/products provided and leads them for further refinement. Solicitation of data mining approaches to process huge volume of data available on net is termed as web mining. Web usage is a further phase in web mining which discovers data about the use of internet. This paper aims at providing a review of phases and techniques involved in web usage mining. Keywords: Web-mining, Preprocessing, Sequential Patterns, Proxy Level Patterns. 1. Introduction 1 In this rapidly growing age of information technology data has gained crucial importance for every organization. It is the most valuable asset for organizations in this era. Due to rapid emergence of electronic data management methods this age is called Information age (Goebel e Gruenwald, 1999).Each organization has a huge volume of data and it is very difficult and often impossible to handle that data without any computer based application. In addition to data management, analysis of such big collection of data is also a huge problem. Today’s databases contain a huge volume of data that manual analysis and valuable decision making is not possible. In many cases a lot of independent fields need to be analyzed at a same time to get accurate results (Goebel e Gruenwald, 1999).Therefore humans require support to improve their analysis ability. The need for automated extraction of relevant data from a huge volume of data is widely recognized now. It leads to discover more efficient techniques for this purpose. This review paper aims to collect and analyze the major approaches which have appeared in web about extraction of web data and provides an overview on mining phases which are most prominent regarding this and most recent trends in it. This paper is divided into five sections. After introduction section 2 gives an overview of related work and discusses in brief data mining in general. Section 3 is about web data, its usage and its structure. Section 4 highlights data foundations for web. Section 5 discussed the approaches used in web usage mining. In the end conclusion is given. *Corresponding author: Tayyaba Ashraf; Imran Ashraf is working as Lecturer in CS & IT Department 2. Terminologies and Background This era is of computer (Khushboo, Vekariya e Mishra, 2012) and electronic information (Han e Kamber, 2006); every sphere of life is based on accurate and timely available data. As a result a huge collection of data is produces in the field of science, medical, marketing and finance etc. (Anwer, Rashid e Hassan, 2010). Automated systems are required for systematize summarization, exploration, and classification of available data. It is helpful for management to take timely and related decisions. A lot of research areas like mathematics, artificial intelligence and meditation are involved to develop such automated systems (Gibson, Kleinberg e Raghavan, 1998; Pei et al., 2000; Kohavi e Provost, 2001; Anwer, Rashid e Hassan, 2010; D.S.Deshpande, 2012; Seerat e Azam, 2012; Shelke, Deshpande e Thakre, 2012). Fig.1 A hierarchical view of web usage mining A large number of applications are presented to store and extract data from huge collections. Such computer based tools and methods are topic of discussion about Knowledge extraction in Database and Text mining is an interdisciplinary field which is used in different areas like Data mining Text Mining Web Mining • Web usage Mining