Semantic Web Mining-A Critical Review

Over the last decade, there is an explosive growth in the information available on the World Wide Web (WWW). Today, web browsers provide easy access to myriad sources of text and multimedia data. More than one billion pages are indexed by search engines, and finding the desired information is not an easy task. This profusion of resources has prompted the need for developing automatic mining techniques on the WWW, thereby giving rise to the term “Web Mining”. The “Semantic Web” aims to address this problem by providing machine interpretable semantics to provide greater machine support for the user. These two areas pave way for the extraction of relevant and meaningful information from the web, thereby giving rise to the term “Semantic Web Mining”. The objective of this paper is to provide an outline of web mining, its various classifications, its subtasks, and to give a perspective to the research community about the potential of applying techniques to extract meaningful patterns. This paper also gives a survey of the recent works in the area of semantic web mining and a comparison of traditional web applications and semantic web applications thereby providing guidelines for future research in the area of semantic web mining.