Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

Spring 5-31-2006

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Sciences - (Ph.D.)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

James Geller

Second Advisor

Yehoshua Perl

Third Advisor

Michael Halper

Fourth Advisor

Yugyung Lee

Fifth Advisor

David Mendonca

Abstract

The existence of the Web has a major impact on people's life styles. Online shopping, online banking, email, instant messenger services, search engines and bulletin boards have gradually become parts of our daily life. All kinds of information can be found on the Web. Web marketing is one of the ways to make use of online information. By extracting demographic information and interest information from the Web, marketing knowledge can be augmented by applying data mining algorithms. Therefore, this knowledge which connects customers to products can be used for marketing purposes and for targeting existing and potential customers. The Web Marketing Project with Ontology Support has the purpose to find and improve marketing knowledge.

In the Web Marketing Project, association rules about marketing knowledge have been derived by applying data mining algorithms to existing Web users' data. An ontology was used as a knowledge backbone to enhance data mining for marketing. The Raising Method was developed by taking advantage of the ontology. Data are preprocessed by Raising before being fed into data mining algorithms. Raising improves the quality of the set of mined association rules by increasing the average support value. Also, new rules have been discovered after applying Raising. This dissertation thoroughly describes the development and analysis of the Raising method. Moreover, a new structure, called Intersection Ontology, is introduced to represent customer groups on demand. Only needed customer nodes are created. Such an ontology is used to simplify the marketing knowledge representation. Finally, some additional ontology usages are mentioned. By integrating an ontology into Web marketing, the marketing process support has been greatly improved.

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