The Scent of a Newsgroup: Providing Personalized Access to Usenet Sites through Web Mining

Personalization is aimed at adapting content delivery to users' profiles: namely, their expectations, preferences and requirements. This chapter surveys some well-known Web mining techniques that can be profitably exploited in order to address the problem of providing personalized access to the contents of Usenet communities. We provide a rationale for the inadequacy of current Usenet services, given the actual scenario in which an increasing number of users with heterogeneous interests look for information scattered over different communities. We discuss how the knowledge extracted from Usenet sites (from the content, the structure and the usability viewpoints) can be suitably adapted to the specific needs and expectations of each user.