Difference Between Data Mining and Web Mining

Data mining refers to the process of extracting useful information, patterns, and trends from huge data sets whereas web mining refers to the process of extracting information from the web document and services, hyperlinks, and server logs. Read the article to know the difference between data mining and web mining.

What is Data Mining?

Data Mining refers to extracting vital information or knowledge from huge data sets. Data Mining is carried out by an individual in a specific condition on a particular set of data with an objective in mind. Data can be anything such as a file, video, photos, text, etc.

Process of data mining

Business Understandings
Data Understandings
Data Preparation
Modeling
Evaluation
Deployment

What is web mining?

Web mining refers to the process of using data mining techniques to extract useful patterns trends and information usually with the help of the internet by dealing with it from web-based documents and services, server logs, and hyperlinks. The main objective of web mining is to discover the designs in web information by collecting and analyzing data in order to get important insights.

Web mining is further divided into three different types

Web content mining
Web structure mining
Web usage mining

Web content mining

Web content mining refers to the process of extracting data from web pages in order to search different patterns trends that gives useful insight. There are various techniques to extract useful data like web scraping.

Let's understand this concept with the help of an example.

In order to conduct an event or any conference, first, you need to gather useful information about the particular location. It means which location is best suited to conduct the conference so that there will be a huge crowd. To perform the analysis, you need to gather information about the specific location about, state, city, and how far the event location from the invitees is located. Web content mining comes into the picture when any location-specific data is extracted from the web.

Web structure mining

Web structure mining refers to the process in which data from hyperlinks that lead to multiple pages are gathered and prepared to search for new patterns and trends. To views an individual's profile from a web page, there is a possibility that they would insert their social media platform links. So, the data is not only extracted from an individual source but also from the nested page through multiple hyperlinks linked with each page.

Web usage mining

When a web application is hosted, multiple web server logs get generated about the application user's web activity.

Application of web mining

Web Advertising

E-commerce personalization
Webspam filtering
Web page categorization

Difference between data mining and web mining

Data Mining	Web Mining
Data mining refers to the process of extracting useful information, patterns, and trends from huge data sets.	Web mining refers to the process of extracting information from the web document and services, hyperlinks, and server logs
Data engineers and data scientists can do data mining.	Data scientists, data engineers, and data analysts can do web mining.
Data mining is based on pattern identification from data available in any system.	Web mining is based on pattern identification from web data.
Tools used by data mining are machine learning algorithms.	Tools used by web mining are PageRank, Scrappy, Apache logs.
Applications of data mining are weather forecast, market analysis, fraud detection, etc.	It uses the same process but on the web using the web documents.
Skill needed for data mining is machine learning algorithms, probability, statistics.	Skills needed for wen mining are application-level knowledge, probability, statistics.