Welcome to the Web Mining course, ITEC-4305 for Winter term 2023. Materials, instructions, and notices for the course will accumulate here over the semester.

The World Wide Web (or the Web for short) is officially defined as a "wide area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents". The rapid growth of the Web in the last decade makes it the largest publicly accessible data source in the world. The Web has many unique characteristics, which make mining useful information and knowledge from the Web a fascinating and challenging task. This course is an advanced course after the courses ITEC4020 "Internet Client-Server Systems" and ITEC3020 "Introduction to Web Technology". It covers some advanced topics and the latest research topics on Web mining.

The major objectives of this course are to introduce Web mining technology from a practical point of view and for the students to obtain a solid grasp of how techniques in Web mining technology can be applied to solve problems in real-world applications.

Web mining aims to discover useful information or knowledge from Web hyperlinks, page contents and usage data. Due to the richness and diversity of information and other Web specific characteristics, Web mining is not just an application of data mining. Web mining has developed many of its own methods, ideas, models and algorithms. This course will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to WWW and Web Mining Systems
• Learning and Knowledge Discovery from the Web
• Information Retrieval (IR) and Web Search
• Web Crawling and Information Integration
• Web Link Analysis such as Social Network Analyis, PageRank and HITS
• Opinion and Sentiments Mining
• Web Aspect Search and Mining
• Web Usage Mining
• Web Mining Applications such as Web Blogs Mining and Online Medical Data Analysis