A Graph Drawing Application to Web Site Traffic Analysis

Abstract

Web site traffic analysis studies how different pages forming Web sites are accessed by their target audience over time. From a business intelligence point of view, it represents one of the key activities for many private companies and public institutions. Recent papers pointed out that Web site traffic analysis is especially useful if it focuses on the user interest into the relevant concepts described in a Web site rather than counting user accesses to the distinct pages forming the Web site. This paper extends existing measures of conceptual Web site traffic analysis and describes a new system that supports this analysis by means of graph visualization techniques. The graph drawing engine of the system is a force-directed heuristic that computes a simultaneous embedding of two suitably defined graphs, that are non-planar in general. The heuristic is especially designed to take into account two important aesthetic criteria of the drawing: crossing resolution and geodesic edge tendency. We also present some experiments and case studies to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in practice.