John Punin announced the Log Markup Language (LOGML), an XML vocabulary designed for "mining data that has been collected from web server logfiles."

LOGML works in concert with XGMML, an XML vocabulary for describing Web site structure. This allows the combination of information about actual visitor traffic with information about the site's structure:

"We also gather the client activity in a web site as a subgraph of the web site graph. This subgraph can be used to get better understanding of general user activity in the web site."

A PDF-format poster describing the LOGML work is also available.

The Web-mining approach, generating reports from log files, is quite different from the Extensible Log Format (XLF) approach, which attempted to create log files as continuously updated XML documents.

Related story:

• XGMML graphs sites