Data Preprocessing Techniques for Pre-Fetching and Caching of Web Data through Proxy Server

The rapid growth of the Web in terms of Web sites and their users during the last decade has put lots of pressure for Web site owners in reducing the latency of Web pages. Web caching and Web prefetching are two important techniques used to tackle these problems and reduce the noticeable response time perceived by users. These two techniques complement each other since the Web caching technique exploits the temporal locality, whereas Web pre-fetching technique utilizes the spatial locality of Web object. By integrating Web caching and Web pre-fetching techniques, the latency time and search space get reduced. Due to this dramatic changes, a huge amount of data related to the user's interactions with the Web sites are recorded in the Web access log. Web access log plays an important role in predicting the user access pattern and pre-fetching and caching of Web data for better performance. Different data mining techniques can be applied on Web usage data to mine user access patterns and this knowledge can be used in a variety of applications such as system improvement, Web site modification, business intelligence etc. This paper discusses various data preprocessing techniques that are carried out at proxy server access log which generate Web access pattern and can also be used for further applications.