From World-Wide-Web Mining to Worldwide Webmining: Understanding People’s Diversity for Effective Knowledge Discovery

摘要

Users are well-established objects of analysis in Web mining: Web usage mining investigates users’ behaviour, Web content and structure mining analyze the content and link structures they generate, Web community mining transfers these questions from analyses of individuals to analyses of groups, etc. However, too often users are reduced to the digital data they have created and/or accessed, and it is (generally implicitly) assumed that “all users are alike” in the ways in which they create and access those data. We argue that to make these analyses and findings more meaningful, a shift is needed from technology to human aspects. This shift calls for a multidisciplinary approach that integrates insights from behavioural, psychological, and linguistic sciences into the field of knowledge discovery. In this paper, we introduce the concept ubiquity of people to emphasize that data and knowledge are created and accessed globally, from users who differ in language, culture, and other factors. The Web is the major medium for these activities. The paper investigates how knowledge discovery, including but not limited to Web mining, may benefit from an integration of the concept of ubiquity of people. We provide an overview of the impact of language and culture on how data and knowledge are accessed, shared, and evaluated. We describe a series of studies as an example of integrating these questions into Web (usage) mining. We conclude with a discussion of research questions that are raised by the integration of the ubiquity of people into knowledge discovery, in particular with regard to data collection, data processing, and data presentation.