Interactive web-wrapper construction for extracting relational information from web documents

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose a new user interface to interactively specify Web wrappers to extract relational information from Web documents. In this study, we focused on improving user's trial-and-error repetitions for constructing a wrapper. Our approach is a combination of a light-weight wrapper construction method and the dynamic previewing interface which quickly previews how generated wrapper works. We adopted a simple algorithm which can construct a Web wrapper from given extraction examples in less than 100 milliseconds. By using the algorithm, our system dynamically generates a new wrapper from a stream of user's mouse events for specifying extraction examples, and immediately updates a preview result that shows how the generated wrapper extracts HTML nodes from a source Web document. Through this animated display, a user can make a lot of wrapper construction trials with various different combinations of extraction examples by only moving a mouse on the Web document, and reach a good set of examples to obtain an intended wrapper in a short time.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alberto H. F. Laender , Berthier A. Ribeiro-Neto , Altigran S. da Silva , Juliana S. Teixeira, A brief survey of web data extraction tools, ACM SIGMOD Record, v.31 n.2, June 2002 [doi>10.1145/565117.565137]
• 2: Dan Gusfield, Algorithms on strings, trees, and sequences: computer science and computational biology, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1997

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Graphical user interfaces (GUI)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
information extraction, user interfaces, web wrappers