Web mining refers to the process of extracting useful knowledge patterns from huge, dynamic, and heterogeneous data on the Web, by means of data mining or machine learning approaches. Social networking research uses network theory and Web mining to analyze complex social structures made up by online user communities. These two areas are covered in this book, where the authors present the theoretical foundation, algorithmic techniques, and practical applications of Web mining, Web personalization and recommendation, and Web community analysis.

The book is organized along three main parts. The first part provides the foundation on information retrieval and Web data management that is necessary for understanding the subject area, and presents some algorithms that are commonly used in applications of Web mining and social network analysis. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to Web mining and data mining, and discusses Web community and social network analysis. Chapter 2 covers the fundamental theoretical background on linear algebra and information retrieval, together with the basic concepts of social network analysis. In chapter 3, the authors review some popular techniques and algorithms in data mining and machine learning to allow the readers to build the necessary foundation for understanding the following chapters. Specifically, this chapter presents techniques and algorithms for association rule mining, classification, clustering, semi-supervised learning, collaborative filtering, and social network analysis, among others.

The second part of the book is devoted to techniques and applications of Web mining and is divided into three chapters on Web content mining, Web linkage mining, and Web usage mining. Chapter 4 concentrates on Web content mining, where the goal is to retrieve interesting content from Web pages as a result of user-supplied Web queries. The authors first present the vector space model, known from the information retrieval literature, and then discuss the principle of Web search, feature enrichment of short texts, and latent semantic analysis. Automatic topic extraction from Web documents and opinion mining are also covered. Chapter 5 is about Web linkage mining, which involves techniques that aim to draw interesting conclusions based on the way that the various pages are linked on the Web. The chapter presents some well-known algorithms for Web search (for example, HITS and PageRank), and sheds light on the topics of Web community discovery, Web graph measurement and modeling, and the usage of link information for Web page classification. In chapter 6, the authors provide techniques for Web usage mining, which aim to discover interesting user navigational patterns from Web logs. This chapter begins with a discussion on the modeling aspect of Web user interests, and then presents popular Web usage mining algorithms that are based on clustering and latent semantic analysis. Some real-world applications of Web usage mining are also given.

The third part of the book is devoted to social networking and Web recommendation systems. In particular, chapter 7 concentrates on the extraction and analysis of online social networks, the temporal analysis of Web communities, and their evolution in online social environments. Chapter 8 is devoted to Web personalization and recommendation. It begins by discussing user-based and item-based collaborative filtering recommender systems, and then investigates the combination of usage mining and collaborative filtering for Web page and query recommendation. Finally, chapter 9 concludes this work by summarizing the covered material and discussing avenues for future research in this area.

Overall, this is an interesting book for people who conduct research in the areas of Web search, Web mining, and social network analysis. The authors’ writing style makes the book easy to follow and the presented material is covered with a good degree of detail, with several references provided at the end of the book to allow for further reading. On the negative side, the preface seems to have been written in a hurry, and several of the figures in the book are not printed clearly.