Web Mining in Soft Computing Relevance and Future Directions

This paper summarizes the different characteristics of web data, the basic components of web mining and its different types. Web mining combines two of the activated research areas: Data Mining and World Wide Web. The Web mining research relates to several researches communities such as Database, Knowledge Discovery, Information Retrieval and Artificial Intelligence. The limitations of some of the existing web mining and knowledge discovery methods and tools are enunciated, and the significance of soft computing (comprising fuzzy logic (FL), artificial neural networks (ANNs), genetic algorithms (GAs), and rough sets (RSs)) highlighted. A survey of the existing literature on “soft web mining” is provided along with the commercially available systems. The prospective areas of web mining where the application of soft computing needs immediate attention are outlined with justification. Scope for future research in developing “soft web mining” systems is explained. An extensive bibliography is also provided.