Web mining has become a popular area of research, integrating the
different research areas of data mining and the World Wide Web.
According to the taxonomy of Web mining, there are three sub-fields of
Web-mining research: Web usage mining, Web content mining and Web
structure mining. These three research fields cover most content and
activities on the Web. With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, Web
mining has become a hot topic and is now part of the mainstream of Web -
search, such as Web information systems and Web intelligence. Among all
of the possible applications in Web research, e-commerce and e-services
have been iden- fied as important domains for Web-mining techniques.
Web-mining techniques also play an important role in e-commerce and
e-services, proving to be useful tools for understanding how e-commerce
and e-service Web sites and services are used, e- bling the provision of
better services for customers and users. Thus, this book will focus upon
Web-mining applications in e-commerce and e-services. Some chapters in
this book are extended from the papers that presented in WMEE 2008 (the
2nd International Workshop for E-commerce and E-services). In addition,
we also sent invitations to researchers that are famous in this research
area to contr- ute for this book. The chapters of this book are
introduced as follows: In chapter 1, Peter I.