Abstract. The analysis of web usage has mostly focused on sites composed of conventional static pages. However, huge amounts of information
available in the web come from databases or other data collections and are presented to the users in the form of dynamically
generated pages. The query interfaces of such sites allow the specification of many search criteria. Their generated results
support navigation to pages of results combining cross-linked data from many sources. For the analysis of visitor navigation
behaviour in such web sites, we propose the web usage miner (WUM), which discovers navigation patterns subject to advanced
statistical and structural constraints. Since our objective is the discovery of interesting navigation patterns, we do not
focus on accesses to individual pages. Instead, we construct conceptual hierarchies that reflect the query capabilities used
in the production of those pages. Our experiments with a real web site that integrates data from multiple databases, the German
SchulWeb, demonstrate the appropriateness of WUM in discovering navigation patterns and show how those discoveries can help
in assessing and improving the quality of the site.
Key words:Web usage mining – Data mining – Web query interfaces – Web databases – Query capabilities – Conceptual hierarchies
Received June 21, 1999 / Accepted December 24, 1999