Using Petri Nets to Enhance Web Usage Mining

Precise analysis of the web structure can facilitate data processing and enhancethe accuracy of the mining results in the procedure of web usage mining. Many researchershave identified that pageview identification and path completion are of great importance inthe result of web usage mining. Currently, there is still a lack of an effective and systematicmethod to analyze and deal with the two steps.In the present study, we propose the application of Petri Nets (PN), a model used to analyzethe framework of webpages in a website. We adopt Place in the PN model to representwebpage on the websites and use Transition to represent hyperlink. The study explores howto undergo the pageview identification after we use the PN model to conduct the analysis ofthe framework and then obtain incident matrix. Likewise, we use reachability property inthe model to undergo path completion.