Graph Visualization Techniques for Conceptual Web Site Traffic Analysis

Systems that support Web site traffic analysis are core business intelligence applications for many companies. Recent papers remark that these systems are especially useful if they measure the users' interest into the relevant concepts described in a Web site rather than counting users' accesses to the distinct pages forming the Web site. This paper extends existing measures of conceptual Web site traffic analysis and describes a system, called COWA, that supports this analysis by means of network models and graph visualization technologies. The graph drawing algorithmic core of the user interface of COWA is a force directed heuristic that computes a simultaneous embedding of two non-planar graphs. This heuristic optimizes the visualizations in terms of crossing resolution and user's geodesic tendency. Experimental results and case studies show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in practice.