International Workshop on the World-Wide Web
and Conceptual Modeling (WWWCM'99),
Paris, France,
November 15-18,
1999.
LNCS 1727, Springer,
pp. 307-320.
A Unified Framework for Wrapping, Mediating and
Restructuring Information from the Web
Wolfgang May, Bertram Ludäscher, Georg Lausen, Rainer Himmeröder
Abstract:
The goal of information extraction from the Web is to provide an
integrated view on heterogeneous information sources via a common
data model and query language. A main problem with current
approaches is that they rely on very different
formalisms and tools for wrappers and mediators, thus leading to an
"impedance mismatch" between the wrapper and mediator level. In
contrast, our approach integrates wrapping and mediation in a
unified framework based on an object-oriented data model
which represents both the Web structure and the data of the
application domain. Wrappers and mediators are written in a
rule-based object-oriented language which is augmented with features
for Web access and structured document analysis, i.e., pattern
matching by regular expressions and SGML parsing. In this paper, we
develop generic, reusable rule patterns for typical extraction,
integration, and restructuring tasks using this framework. We show
the practicability of our approach by using the FLORID system.
[postscript]
[Slides]
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