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Web mining is one of the mining technologies, which applies data mining techniques in large amount of web data to improve the web services. Web traversal pattern mining discovers most of the users’ access patterns from web logs. This information can provide the navigation suggestions for web users such that appropriate actions can be adopted. However, the web data will grow rapidly in the short time, and some of the web data may be antiquated. The user behaviors may be changed when the new web data is inserted into and the old web data is deleted from web logs. Besides, it is considerably difficult to select a perfect minimum support threshold during the mining process to find the interesting rules. Even though the experienced experts, they also cannot determine the appropriate minimum support. Thus, we must constantly adjust the minimum support until the satisfactory mining results can be found. The essences of incremental or interactive data mining are that we can use the previous mining results to reduce the unnecessary processes when the minimum support is changed or web logs are updated. In this paper, we propose efficient incremental and interactive data mining algorithms to discover web traversal patterns and make the mining results to satisfy the users’ requirements. The experimental results show that our algorithms are more efficient than the other approaches.

Elaborating on earlier research by Vrechopoulos et al., this paper aims to investigate web banking store layout effects on user‐consumer behaviour and to report on a laboratory experimental investigation into user acceptance of three different layout types.

A web banking store was developed in three versions equal to the number of the alternative layouts manipulated by the laboratory experimental design. Two layout types were transformed from conventional banking and one type was designed by incorporating users' preferences and suggestions. The relationships in technology acceptance model (TAM) in the three treatments are tested separately, and then the subjects' evaluations on TAM constructs are compared.

The findings imply that store layout affects online consumer behaviour, confirming the findings of Vrechopoulos et al. in a different sector. The study also confirms the TAM relationships in all treatments and indicates that layout has an effect on user acceptance of web banking in terms of TAM constructs.

This study confirms the available knowledge regarding a store layout's influencing role on consumer behaviour in the context of web commerce.

Direct managerial implications for web banking are provided through the design of the “improved future” layout, which is depicted in the form of an abstract interface design.

The paper adopts an innovative conclusive causal research design towards testing the research hypotheses. To that end, an experimental application was developed in the laboratory and the research hypotheses were “packed‐up” with references from different disciplines (i.e. marketing and information systems) providing through that an interdisciplinary nature on the present study.

This study used the Delphi technique with 31 seasoned leadership educators who, over the course of two rounds, were tasked to categorize the level of complexity of 60 leadership competencies. What resulted was a five-tier taxonomy based on the level of complexity of each of the 60 competencies assessed. The taxonomy also includes four categorical clusters of similar competencies and three domain levels of instructional design. A description of the Delphi technique, results of the study, the taxonomy model, and methods for employing the model are described.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new tool which detects, prevents and records common web attacks that mainly result in web applications information leaking using pattern recognition. It is a cross‐platform application, namely, it is not OS‐dependent or web server dependent. It offers a flexible attacks search engine, which scans http requests and responses during a webpage serving without affecting the web server performance.

The paper starts with a study of the most known web vulnerabilities and the way they can be exploited. Then, it focuses on those web attacks based on input validation, which are the ones the new tool detects through pattern recognition. This tool acts as a proxy server having a simple GUI for administration purposes. Patterns can be detected in both http requests and responses in an extensible and manageable way.

The new tool was compared to dotDefender, a commercial web application firewall, and ModSecurity, a widely used open source application firewall, using over 200 attack patterns. The new tool had satisfying results for every attack category examined having a high percentage of success. Results for stored XSS could not be achieved since the other tools are not able to search and detect them in http responses. The fact that the new tool is very extensible, it makes it possible for future work to be done.

This paper introduces a new web server plug‐in, which has some advanced web application firewall features with a flexible attacks search engine which scans http requests and responses. By scanning http responses, attacks such as stored XSS can be detected, a feature that cannot be found on other web application firewalls.

Summarization of an entire web site with diverse content may lead to a summary heavily biased towards the site's dominant topics. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel topic‐based framework to address this problem.

A two‐stage framework is proposed. The first stage identifies the main topics covered in a web site via clustering and the second stage summarizes each topic separately. The proposed system is evaluated by a user study and compared with the single‐topic summarization approach.

The user study demonstrates that the clustering‐summarization approach statistically significantly outperforms the plain summarization approach in the multi‐topic web site summarization task. Text‐based clustering based on selecting features with high variance over web pages is reliable; outgoing links are useful if a rich set of cross links is available.

More sophisticated clustering methods than those used in this study are worth investigating. The proposed method should be tested on web content that is less structured than organizational web sites, for example blogs.

The proposed summarization framework can be applied to the effective organization of search engine results and faceted or topical browsing of large web sites.

Several key components are integrated for web site summarization for the first time, including feature selection and link analysis, key phrase and key sentence extraction. Insight into the contributions of links and content to topic‐based summarization was gained. A classification approach is used to minimize the number of parameters.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the state-of-the-art session identification techniques used in web usage mining (WUM) process in terms of their limitations, features, and methodologies.

In this research, systematic literature review has been conducted using review protocol approach. The methodology consisted of a comprehensive search for relevant literature over the period of 2005-2015, using four online database repositories (i.e. IEEE, Springer, ACM Digital Library, and ScienceDirect).

The findings revealed that this research area is still immature and existing literature lacks the critical review of recent session identification techniques used in WUM process.

The contribution of this study is to provide a structured overview of the research developments, to critically review the existing session identification techniques, highlight their limitations and associated challenges and identify areas where further improvements are required so as to complement the performance of existing techniques.

Navigation problems in a hypertext might be reduced, if multiple, coherent views of the hypertext were available. Document outlines help readers appreciate the structure and meaning of the document. We propose measures of syntactic and lexical balance in an outline and show in a sample of documents the degree to which these balances occur. Based on balance in an outline, a method for semi‐automatically generating an alternative outline is applied to one textbook. The textbook with both its original and its alternative outline is available in hypertext, and subjects who were asked to evaluate this hypertext noted that the alternative outline would help readers compare concepts in the textbook. The computer programs for generating outlines have been used in several writing tasks, including the writing of this paper.

To provide librarians with a better understanding of what makes online content truly accessible and to increase awareness of the current common accessibility issues found in library web sites and vendor supplied electronic resources.

A through and in-depth literature review takes a look at the web accessibility problems historically found in library web sites. It then briefly explains the basics of web accessibility and delves more deeply into structural content access, which is the hallmark of true accessibility. The simple mechanics as well as the pros and cons of traditional methods of providing keyboard access to web content is discussed. The chapter then provides a gentle introduction to HTML5 and the Web Accessibility Initiative-Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA), current use, techniques for use, and application opportunities. The chapter also provides the research results of a broad examination of the basic structural accessibility state of many current database providers.

The research shows that the accessibility of library web sites is improving; however many library vendor database products still have significant accessibility problems.

Through the practical accessibility explanations, the chapter points out the ways librarians can use this knowledge to work with users and communicate with product providers regarding the accessibility of library resources.

This chapter provides a rich resource for understanding and implementing web accessibility, particularly as it applies to keyboard navigation and the new accessibility features in HTML5 and WAI-ARIA.

Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.

This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.

The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.

Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

The authors introduce two semantics-based navigation applications that facilitate information-seeking activities in internal link-based web sites in Wikipedia. These applications aim to help users find concepts within a topic and related articles on a given topic quickly and then gain topical knowledge from internal link-based encyclopedia web sites. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The WNavi s application consists of three information visualization (IV) tools which are a topic network, a hierarchy topic tree and summaries for topics. The WikiMap application consists of a topic network. The goal of the topic network and topic tree tools is to help users to find the major concepts of a topic and identify relationships between these major concepts easily. In addition, in order to locate specific information and enable users to explore and read topic-related articles quickly, the topic tree and summaries for topics tools support users to gain topical knowledge quickly. The authors then apply the k-clique of cohesive indicator to analyze the sub topics of the seed query and find out the best clustering results via the cosine measure. The authors utilize four metrics, which are correctness, time cost, usage behaviors, and satisfaction, to evaluate the three interfaces. These metrics measure both the outputs and outcomes of applications. As a baseline system for evaluation the authors used a traditional Wikipedia interface. For the evaluation, the authors used an experimental user study with 30 participants.

The results indicate that both WikiMap and WNavi s supported users to identify concepts and their relations better compared to the baseline. In topical tasks WNavi s over performed both WikiMap and the baseline system. Although there were no time differences in finding concepts or answering topical questions, the test systems provided users with a greater gain per time unit. The users of WNavi s leaned on the hierarchy tree instead of other tools, whereas WikiMap users used the topic map.

The findings have implications for the design of IR support tools in knowledge-intensive web sites that help users to explore topics and concepts.

The authors explored to what extent the use of each IV support tool contributed to successful exploration of topics in search tasks. The authors propose extended task-based evaluation measures to understand how each application provides useful context for users to accomplish the tasks and attain the search goals. That is, the authors not only evaluate the output of the search results, e.g. the number of relevant items retrieved, but also the outcome provided by the system for assisting users to attain the search goal.