Optimization of data retrieval through web mining

The ever growing size of data bases is making it hard for the researchers and decision makers to extract the data as relevant for their analysis. It is hard for researchers to retrieve data by browsing because there are many following links contained in a web page. Keyword searching will return a large amount of irrelevant data. On the other hand, traditional data extraction and mining techniques cannot be applied directly to the web due to its semi-structured or even unstructured nature. Web pages are Hypertext documents, which contain both text and hyperlinks to other documents. Furthermore, other data sources also exist, such as mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, etc. Thus, design and implementation of a web mining research support system has become a challenge for people with interest in utilizing information from the web for their research.