Web mining: a key enabler in e-business

The Web is becoming the apocryphal Vox Populi. There is an ever expanding amount of information "out there". Unfortunately, the morass of sources presents a formidable hurdle to effectively extract information from them. Web mining consists of extracting knowledge from huge volumes of data available in WWW and other Web sources, allowing better business decisions to be taken. Web mining has been coined from information management & retrieval (IM&R) and artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, it has been shown how Web mining is integrated to the knowledge discovery process, its potential applications, and techniques. Furthermore, an integrated architecture has been presented showing how Web mining can contribute to e-business via the new technologies. Finally, some commercially-available architecture has been presented.