Web mining: The next big thing

One aspect of business intelligence that's not a real factor now — but certainly

will be — is Web mining. As traditional data mining looks for hidden patterns

and relationships in data residing in databases and data warehouses, Web

mining looks for similar links in data derived from mouse clicks on Web

sites.

"It's the next big trend," said Brent Hieggelke, director of corporate

marketing for WebTrends Corp. "People have realized that this vast volume

of [Web-based] data is really, really rich. And if we can integrate it

with other kinds of data, it simply multiplies the kinds of information

we can get out of it."

By mining Web data, government agencies will be able to construct profiles

of the people who go to their Web sites and know what kinds of information

they typically look for and how they look for it. They can then design their

Web sites so that people will be able to find information as fast as possible.