Parameter driven synthetic web database generation
To support intelligent data analysis on the web information, a data warehousing system called WHOWEDA (WareHouse Of WEb DAta) has been proposed. Unlike other relational data warehouses, WHOWEDA incorporates a Web Data Model that describes the web objects and their relationships as they are maintained within a data warehouse. A set of web operations has also been developed to manipulate the warehoused web information. In order to measure the performance of WHOWEDA and other similar systems that store and manipulate web information, a synthetic web database generator called WEDAGEN (WEb DAtabase GENerator) has been developed. It has the capability of generating collections of web objects of different sizes and complexities determined by a set of user-specified parameters. This paper presents the issues in the design and implementation of WEDAGEN. It also gives a detailed description of its system components and the strategy to generate synthetic web databases. A formal analysis of the generated web database and an empirical assessment of WEDAGEN has been reported.