User Session Identification Using Extended Href Method

One part of web log mining covers the process of discovering web users' behaviour patterns. This process employs user session identification techniques based on the web structure. There are some common heuristic methods which use referral URL from the web server log file. Using the referral URL is an alternative technique for the user session identification. We identified possible deficiencies of the common used h-ref methods and propose its extension. We applied the extended h-ref method on the web server log file and thus identified the user session in a different way. Next we compared basic characteristics of extracted user behaviour rules using the descriptive statistic methods among different h-ref methods. Results of the experiment show that the extended h-ref method does not affect session identification, only affect the inclusion of page visits into existing sessions. The new h-ref method is as effective as the generic one.