Towards a Hypermedia-enabled and Web-based Data Analysis Framework

Abstract

Making better business decisions is often the key to gaining competitive advantage. An important factor in effective decision-making is the ability to access, understand, and utilise business information easily. In this paper, we propose a framework that focuses on integrating data analysis tools into the Web and providing hypermedia functionality to them, and supporting the development of hypermedia functionalities with Web usage mining techniques. In this framework, data analysis tools play the role of utilizing historical data to discover useful information and improve the process of business decisions. Augmenting data analysis tools with rich hypermedia functionality would streamline access to and provide rich navigational features around related information, while augmenting hypermedia facilities with Web usage mining would allow them to dynamically restructure the Web site to fit users’ browsing needs based on past navigation history. We believe that the proposed framework should result in new ways to view and manage data analysis tools and help users easily browse Web sites.