Abstract
The Word Wide Web has become one of the most important information repositories. However, information in web pages is free from standards in presentation and lacks being organized in a good format. It is a challenging work to extract appropriate and useful information from Web pages. Currently, many web extraction systems called web wrappers, either semi-automatic or fully-automatic, have been developed. In this paper, some existing techniques are investigated, then our current work on web information extraction is presented. In our design, we have classified the patterns of information into static and non-static structures and use different technique to extract the relevant information. In our implementation, patterns are represented with XSL files, and all the extracted information is packaged into a machine-readable format of XML.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Eikvil, L.: Information Extraction from World Wide Web – A Survey, Technical Report 945, Norweigan Computing Center, Oslo, Norway (July 1999)
Laender, A.H.F., Ribeiro-Neto, B.A., da Silva, A.S., Teixeira, J.S.: A brief survey of Web data extraction tools. ACM Sigmod Record 31(2), 84–93 (2002)
Hammer, J., McHugh, J., Garcia-Molina, H.: Semistructured Data: The TSIMMIS Experience. In: Hammer, J., McHugh, J., Garcia-Molina, H. (eds.) Proc. I East-European Workshop on Advances in Database and Information Systems - ADBIS 1997, Petersburg, Russia (1997)
Arocena, G., Mendelzon, A.: WebOQL: Restructuring Documents, Databases, and Webs. In: Proc. IEEE Intl. Conf. Data Engineering 1998, Orlando (February 1998)
Liu, L., Pu, C., Han, W.: XWRAP: An XML-enabled wrapper construction system for web information sources. In: Proceedings of the international conference on data engineering (ICDE), pp. 611–621 (2000)
Crescenzi, V., Mecca, G., Merialdo, P.: Roadrunner: Towards automatic data extraction from large web sites. In: Proc 27th Very Large Databases Conference, VLDB 2001, pp. 109–118 (2001)
Freitag, D.: Information Extraction from HTML: Application of a General Learning Approach. In: Proceedings of the 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 1998) (1998)
Solderland, S.: Learning Information Extraction Rules for Semi-structured and Free Text. Machine Learning 34, 233–272 (1999)
Etzioni, O., Cafarella, M., Downey, D., Kok, S., Popescu, A.-M., Shaked, T., Soderland, S., Weld, D.S., Yates, A.: Web-scale information extraction in KnowItAll (preliminary results). In: Proceedings of the 13th World Wide Web Conference, pp. 100–109 (2004)
Hsu, C.-N., Dung, M.-T.: Generating finite-state transducers for semi-structured data extraction from the web. Information Systems 23(8), 521–538 (1998)
Muslea, I., Minton, S., Knoblock, C.: Hierarchical wrapper induction for semistructured information sources. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 4(1/2), 93–114 (2001)
Adelberg, B.: NoDoSE—A Tool for Semi-Automatically Extracting Structured and Semistructured Data from Text Documents. In: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Seattle, Washington, June 1998, pp. 283–294 (1998)
Snoussi, H., Magnin, L., Nie, J.-Y.: Toward an Ontology-based Web Data Extraction (2002)
Buttler, D., Liu, L., Pu, C.: A Fully Automated Object Extraction System for the World Wide Web. In: Proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pp. 361–370 (2001)
Papadakis, N.K., Skoutas, D., Raftopoulos, K.: IEEE Computer Society. In: Varvarigou, T.A. (ed.) STAVIES: A System for Information Extraction from Unknown Web Data Sources through Automatic Web Wrapper Generation Using Clustering Techniques, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 17(12), pp. 1638–1652 (December 2005)
Xiao, L., Wissmann, D.: Information Extraction from the Web: System and Techniques. Applied Intelligence 21, 195–224 (2004)
Miller, G.A., Beckwith, R., Fellbaum, C., Gross, D., Miller, K.: Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database, Revised (August 1993)
Cardie, C.: Empirical methods in information extraction. AI Magazine 18(4), 65–80 (1997)
Miniwatts Marking Group, URL 1: http://www.internetworldstats.com/
XHTML, W3C Recommendation, URL 2: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
XSLT Tutorial, URL 3: http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XSLTutorial/Output/contents.html
XSL Transformations, W3C Recommendation, URL 4: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt.html
XML Schema Primer, W3C Working Draft, URL 5: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/
HTML Tidy Library Project, URL 6: http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
Saxon Processor, URL 7: http://www.saxonica.com/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lam, M.I., Gong, Z., Muyeba, M. (2008). A Method for Web Information Extraction. In: Zhang, Y., Yu, G., Bertino, E., Xu, G. (eds) Progress in WWW Research and Development. APWeb 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4976. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78849-2_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78849-2_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-78848-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-78849-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)