Web Personalization Systems and Web Usage Mining: A Review

Nowadays, the field of web personalization is growing exponentially. From e-mail, e-trading, internet forum to social networking based websites, directly or indirectly utilize web personalization and recommendation system for providing customized services to their loyal users. Personalization is achieved through web mining, i.e. extracting knowledge from the collected data. Knowledge is then filtered and processed to model user behavior that forms the basis of a personalized system. This paper presents a brief review of recent research efforts in web personalization and recommendation by means of web usage mining, for the benefit of research in this area. It also elaborates the role of web usage mining in personalization, and presents the open challenges that are yet to be met.