An Ordered Concept Lattice and Incremental Discovery of User Traversal Patterns on the WWW

Traversal patterns reflect the regularities when web users browse and select web pages along URL hyper links The discovery of traversal patterns is useful for search engines to personalize their navigation by guiding web surfers to reach their target web pages rapidly Although some work has been conducted for mining user traversal patterns from server logs,no incremental algorithm has been reported The mining of user traversal patterns can be accomplished in three steps: ① extracting maximal forward reference paths from server log; ② discovering frequent reference paths based on the result of the first step; and ③ filtering to get maximal frequent reference paths from the output of the second step The second step constitutes the core of the whole mining process To take a systematic approach, sequential restrictions are added to the concept lattice （Galois lattice）, and an ordered concept lattice is defined The proposed ordered concept lattice is then used in discovering frequent user traversal patterns An incremental and efficient mining algorithm is put forward,and a comparison with related works is also conducted Experimental results on both synthetic and real life data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the novel algorithm