Web log analysis: a review of a decade of studies about information acquisition, inspection and interpretation of user interaction

In the last decade, the importance of analyzing information management systems logs has grown, because log data constitute a relevant aspect in evaluating the quality of such systems. A review of 10 years of research on log analysis is presented in this study. About 50 papers and posters from five major conferences and about 30 related journal papers have been selected to trace the history of the state-of-the-art in this field. The study presents an overview of two main themes: Web search engine log analysis and digital library system log analysis. The problem of the analysis of different sources of log data and the distribution of data are investigated.