DRAFT Version 1 TR/COE_WM/1.1/11/2005

Abstract. The rapid expansion of the web is causing the constant growth of information, leading to several problems such as an increased difficulty of extracting potentially useful knowledge. Web content mining confronts this problem by gathering explicit information from different web sites for its access and knowledge discovery. In this paper we survey the research in the area of Web content mining. Firstly we try to put this area in its right place by well defining it and the other fields relative to it. Then we summarize the main problems Web content mining faces due to the nature of data it deals with, using this data to categorize the different approaches of Web content mining. For each approach we list the different techniques utilized. We also list one of the real life applications that employ Web content mining. For the survey we focus on representation issues as the criteria. We conclude the paper with some research issues. 1 Web Mining: Web mining is the use of data mining techniques to automatically discover and extract information from Web documents and services (Etzioni, 1996). This area of researc