Usability Research Of Government Website Based On WEB Log Mining

E-government is the key of China informationization. The construction of portal site of central government can provide public service effectively. Currently the government portal sites of China take the quantities of information and service to evaluate their performance, barely care about the acceptance and usage of the user. The design of the sites doesn't meet the navigation way of the user, and causes the inconvenience to the users. Usability analyzes the quality of the WEB site from the user perspective. It's the combination of the facts that affect the user behavior. There are lots of evaluations of usability, such as heuristic evaluation, field observation, interviews and questionnaires, but these evaluations analyze some typical users, not all of them. The data mining of WEB log, can analyze the usability of a WEB site from another view. WEB servers store enormous data of user behavior. The pattern and rule can be discovered by analyzing and mining the WEB log, and they present the usability of website objectively. Therefore mining and analyzing the WEB log are important to website usability.This research uses data mining to analyze the WEB log. We identify user by the IP and relative information, rebuild the navigation process and form the session. After data mining of the session, we discover the behavior pattern and rule, and then promote the usability of government portal website.This research takes Zhejiang government portal website as the object of the research, aims to promote the e-government usability. The research methods and conclusions as follows:First, we introduce the pre-process of the WEB log, clean the WEB log data and form the session by appropriate algorithm, to meet the need of data mining. Second, we analyze the WEB usage mining algorithms, mine the session data, and discover the navigation pattern.Third, we analyze the pattern from usability aspect, discover the relevance of WEB usage mining and usability, and find the usability problem of government website.Data mining as an effective method, helps WEB site developer find usability problem from users'behavior, and eventually promotes the design of e-government.