Wrapper generation for semi-structured Internet sources

ABSTRACT

With the current explosion of information on the World Wide Web (WWW) a wealth of information on many different subjects has become available on-line. Numerous sources contain information that can be classified as semi-structured. At present, however, the only way to access the information is by browsing individual pages. We cannot query web documents in a database-like fashion based on their underlying structure. However, we can provide database-like querying for semi-structured WWW sources by building wrappers around these sources. We present an approach for semi-automatically generating such wrappers. The key idea is to exploit the formatting information in pages from the source to hypothesize the underlying structure of a page. From this structure the system generates a wrapper that facilitates querying of a source and possibly integrating it with other sources. We demonstrate the ease with which we are able to build wrappers for a number of internet sources in different domains using our implemented wrapper generation toolkit.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design

          Nouns: Internet

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Query processing
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL

General Terms:
Design, Management, Measurement, Performance, Theory