Using Open Web APIs in Teaching Web Mining

With the advent of the World Wide Web, many business applications that utilize data mining and text mining techniques to extract useful business information on the Web have evolved from Web searching to Web mining. It is important for students to acquire knowledge and hands-on experience in Web mining during their education in information systems curricula. This paper reports on an experience using open Web application programming interfaces (APIs) that have been made available by major Internet companies (e.g., Google, Amazon, and eBay) in a class project to teach Web mining applications. The instructor's observations of the students' performance and a survey of the students' opinions show that the class project achieved its objectives and students acquired valuable experience in leveraging the APIs to build interesting Web mining applications.