The objective of our project is to design and implement a Web Site Agent (WEBSA) to help users navigating a web site efficiently. Our implementation is associated with the WPI Computer Science Web Site. Our idea is derived from the concept of "Adaptive Web Sites", which is proposed by Oren Etzioni and Mike Perkowitz from the University of Washington. However, instead of making changes to the organization and presentation of the original web page, we deliver a "suggestion service" in a separate frame. This service observes from the users' access patterns, which resulted from mining the raw data from the WPI CS web log file. Using our own heuristics, our service offers weighted suggestions to the users. We use an Oracle database and perform the data analysis using a Java program that communicates with the database using JDBC and with the web agent at our web server. All computations for updating and mining the information are done in advance in [sic] a nightly basis. This method together with the database fine-tuning guarantees high performance, even when the raw data is on the order of one GB.

• This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

Creator

• Wu, Tony Yi-Sheng
• Liu, Lijun

Publisher

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Identifier

• 99D018M

Advisor

• Cruz, Isabel F.

Year

• 1999

Date created

• 1999-01-01

Resource type

• Major Qualifying Project

Major

• Computer Science

Rights statement

• In Copyright