Data Mining & Electronic Commerce

Many users of the Internet are aware that each time they connect to an on-line shopping server, they leave behind a ‘footprint’ in the site’s server logs. The information contained in this footprint is innocuous, but it can be ‘mined’. Data mining is the ‘non-trivial process of identifying valid, novel, potentially useful and ultimately understandable patterns in data’. This paper outlines the types of data available for mining, describes operation and limitations of the mining algorithms, and discusses the marketing and ethical issues that arise.