An Overview of Web Mining in Societal Benefit Areas

A survey of web mining research related to areas of social benefit is the focus of this paper. We particularly focus on web mining that may help and benefit societal areas in ways of extracting new knowledge, providing support for decision making and empowering valuable management of societal issues. E-commerce and E-business are two fields empowered by web mining having lots of applications for increasing sales and doing intelligence business. Have areas of social interest also been empowered by web mining applications? What is currently the ongoing research and current trends in e-services areas infields like E-learning, E-Government, E-Politics and E-democracy? What other areas of social interest can be benefited from web mining? This paper will try to provide the answers by reviewing the literature for applications and methods applied to the above fields.