A Web Application Path Analysis through Server Logs

Sevgi Koyuncu Tunç, Özgür Külcü

2018

Abstract

Web server logs contain certain information about accessing web pages. When this information is analysed using data mining methods, information about users' web page visiting habit, frequency and behaviour can be obtained. This allows us to improve service quality by measuring the usability and performance of web applications. The most important advantage of the remote usability evaluation method with server logs is that it is implemented without any communication with the user. While the user is using the system in a routine and natural environment, it is possible to access real user activity information with recorded logs. Users visit the web application one or more times. The web page calls during each visit bring up a session. User sessions must be distinguished to determine the route that users follow when using a web application. For this purpose, log records were processed through the following steps; Data Cleaning, Page Address Coding, Session Detection and Specification of all URL sequences in this research. There are 3 methods in the literature to distinguish the sessions from each other. The start of the sessions can be determined according to the total duration of the session, the time spent on the page, and the page source (Spiliopoulou et al., 2003). This research was based on total session duration, and the page calls made by the user in 10 minutes and 15 minutes were considered as a session. Hacettepe University Electronic Document Management System’s (EDMS) 16 million access logs were pre - processed and analysed to obtain system usage data. The research revealed weaknesses of the EDMS web pages in terms of usability via path frequency analysis.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Tunç S. and Külcü Ö. (2018). A Web Application Path Analysis through Server Logs.In Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: FR-HT, ISBN 978-989-758-330-8, pages 427-430. DOI: 10.5220/0007231804270430

in Bibtex Style

@conference{fr-ht18,
author={Sevgi Koyuncu Tunç and Özgür Külcü},
title={A Web Application Path Analysis through Server Logs},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: FR-HT,},
year={2018},
pages={427-430},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007231804270430},
isbn={978-989-758-330-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: FR-HT,
TI - A Web Application Path Analysis through Server Logs
SN - 978-989-758-330-8
AU - Tunç S.
AU - Külcü Ö.
PY - 2018
SP - 427
EP - 430
DO - 10.5220/0007231804270430