WIM: an information mining model for the Web

This paper presents a model to mine information in applications involving Web and graph analysis, referred to as WIM - Web information mining - model. We demonstrate the model characteristics using a Web warehouse. The Web data in the warehouse is modeled as a graph, where nodes represent Web pages and edges represent hyperlinks. In the model, objects are always sets of nodes and belong to one class. We have physical objects containing attributes directly obtained from Web pages and links, as the title of a Web page or the start and end pages of a link. Logical objects can be created by performing predefined operations on any existing object. In this paper we present the model components, propose a set of eleven operators and give examples of views. A view is a sequence of operations on objects, and it represents a way to mine information in the graph. As practical examples, we present views for clustering nodes and for identifying related item sets.