  With the huge amount of information available online, the World Wide Web is a
fertile area for data mining research. The Web mining research is at the cross
road of research from several research communities, such as database,
information retrieval, and within AI, especially the sub-areas of machine
learning and natural language processing. However, there is a lot of confusions
when comparing research efforts from different point of views. In this paper,
we survey the research in the area of Web mining, point out some confusions
regarded the usage of the term Web mining and suggest three Web mining
categories. Then we situate some of the research with respect to these three
categories. We also explore the connection between the Web mining categories
and the related agent paradigm. For the survey, we focus on representation
issues, on the process, on the learning algorithm, and on the application of
the recent works as the criteria. We conclude the paper with some research
issues.
