Enabling Semantic Analysis of User Browsing Patterns in the Web of Data

Abstract

A useful step towards better interpretation and analysis of the usage patterns is to formalize the semantics of the resources that users are accessing in the Web. We focus on this problem and present an approach for the semantic formalization of usage logs, which lays the basis for effective techniques of querying expressive usage patterns. We also present a query answering approach, which is useful to find in the logs expressive patterns of usage behavior via formulation of semantic and temporal-based constraints.We have processed over 30 thousand user browsing sessions extracted from usage logs of DBPedia and Semantic Web Dog Food. The logs are semantically formalized using respective domain ontologies and RDF representations of the Web resources being accessed. We show the effectiveness of our approach through experimental results, providing in this way an exploratory analysis of the way users browse the Web of Data.

How Users Explore Ontologies on the Web: A Study of NCBO's BioPortal Usage Logs

“…Making sense and interpreting such sequential data is not a trivial task. The work in Hoxha et al [10] proposes a platform to analyze user browsing patterns by semantically formalizing the usage logs of Web data, providing means to query and retrieve sessions of users that satisfy certain semantic and temporal conditions. Research has also been focused on human behavior beyond browsing patterns and study reading behavior of users in Wikipedia as well as the stability of the reading patterns per user [14].…”