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ABLA: An Algorithm for Repairing Structure-Based Locators Through Attribute Annotations

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Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2020 (WISE 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12343))

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Abstract

The growth of the web has been unstoppable in the last decade, which leads to an increasing demand for extracting information from it. Apart from the need to extract information, this growth also has brought the necessity to adapt web pages to user requirements, create annotations or test web applications. Due to the evolution of web pages, the complexity of the implementation of these techniques has increased. Being able to test, annotate, adapt and extract information from web pages correctly and efficiently has become a primary task. In order to perform all these tasks, it is mandatory to have the best mechanisms to effectively and unequivocally locate the desired elements throughout the web page life cycle, especially when a web page evolves. Different mechanisms are used to find web nodes. These mechanisms, called locators, are prone to fail over time owing to changes on websites. Many authors improve life expectancy of locators developing algorithms that use different types of locators. Some others have created algorithms that regenerate locators by saving extra information from the previous structure of the website. These algorithms extend the useful life of locators but their computational and storage cost is much higher. To avoid these problems, we have designed an algorithm that employs an attribute system embedded in the HTML code. The algorithm is able to regenerate the locators based on these attributes every time a single change takes place in a given element attribute. The evaluation of the proposal shows a much lower computational cost than in previous works.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://archive.org/web/.

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Acknowledgments

This work was carried out by the Software and Systems Engineering research group of Mondragon Unibertsitatea (IT1326-19), supported by the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mondragon University, Arrasate-Mondragon, Spain

    Iñigo Aldalur, Felix Larrinaga & Alain Perez

Authors
  1. Iñigo Aldalur
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  2. Felix Larrinaga
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  3. Alain Perez
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Iñigo Aldalur , Felix Larrinaga or Alain Perez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Zhisheng Huang

  2. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Wouter Beek

  3. Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Hua Wang

  4. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia

    Rui Zhou

  5. Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Yanchun Zhang

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Aldalur, I., Larrinaga, F., Perez, A. (2020). ABLA: An Algorithm for Repairing Structure-Based Locators Through Attribute Annotations. In: Huang, Z., Beek, W., Wang, H., Zhou, R., Zhang, Y. (eds) Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2020. WISE 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12343. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62008-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62008-0_7

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62008-0

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