Summarizing the Contents of Web Server Logs: A Fuzzy Linguistic Approach

We show how linguistic data (base) summaries, originated by Yager [26] and further developed first, in a more conventional form, by Kacprzyk and Yager [7], and Kacprzyk, Yager and Zadrozny [8], and then, in a more general context of Zadeh´s protoforms, and a more implementation oriented context by Kacprzyk and Zadrozny [16], can be employed for deriving human consistent summaries of Web server logs. Such (short) linguistic summaries make it possible to capture, even by an inexperience and novice user, the essence of what happens as to the accesses to the server. This information may greatly benefit the reporting, advertising, and decision making processes in a company by, e.g., helping improve navigation paths, better organize paid search advertising, personalize Web site access, better designing B2B interfaces, etc.