Abstract
Along with the popularity of the world wide web, data volumes inside web databases have been increasing tremendously. These deep web contents, hidden behind the query interfaces, are of much better quality than those in the surface web. Internet users need to fill in query conditions in the HTML query interface and click the submit button to obtain deep web data. Many deep web contents related applications, like named entity attribute collection, topic-focused crawling, and heterogeneous data integration, are based on understanding schema of these query interfaces. The schema needs to cover mappings of input elements and labels, data types of valid input values, and range constraints of the input values. Additionally, to extract these hidden data, the schema needs to include many form submission related information, like cookies and action types. We design and implement a Heuristics-based deep web query interface Schema Extraction system (HSE). In HSE, texts surrounding elements are collected as candidate labels. We propose a string similarity function and use a dynamic similarity threshold to cleanse candidate labels. In HSE, elements, candidate labels, and new lines in the query interface are streamlined to produce its Interface Expression (IEXP). By combining the user’s view and the designer’s view, with the aid of semantic information, we build heuristic rules to extract schema from IEXP of query interfaces in the ICQ dataset. These rules are constructed through utilizing (1) the characteristics of labels and elements, and (2) the spatial, group, and range relationships of labels and elements. Supplemented with form submission related information, the extracted schemas are then stored in the XML format, so that they could be utilized in further applications, like schema matching and merging for federated query interface integration. The experimental results on the TEL-8 dataset illustrate that HSE produces effective performance.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
25 June 2019
The original copy of this article included incorrect data for “authors and affiliations”.
25 June 2019
The original copy of this article included incorrect data for ���authors and affiliations���.
References
Awadallah, H., Bahaaeldin, M., Haw, S.-C., & Soon, L.-K. (2018). A review on utilising XML as the mediated ;ayer for data integration. Advanced Science Letters, 24(2), 1191–1195(5).
Bergman, M. K. (2001). The deep web: surfacing hidden value. Technical report, BrightPlanet LLC.
Dragut, E. C., Kabisch, T., Yu, C., & Leser, U. (2009). A hierarchical approach to model web query interfaces for web source integration. In Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (pp. 325–335).
Furche, T., Gottlob, G., Grasso, G., Guo, X., Orsi, G., & Schallhart, C. (2013). The ontological key: automatically understanding and integrating forms to access the deep web. The VLDB Journal, 22(5), 615–640.
He, H., Meng, W., Yu, C., & Wu, Z. (2005). Constructing interface schemas for search interfaces of web databases. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (pp. 29–42).
He, H., Meng, W., Lu, Y., Yu, C., & Wu, Z. (2007). Towards deeper understanding of the search interfaces of the deep web. World Wide Web, 10(2), 133–155.
Jou, C. (2016). Deep web query interface integration based on incremental schema matching and merging. In Proceedings of the the 3rd Multidisciplinary International Social Networks Conference on Social Informatics, Data Science, Article No. 34.
Khare, R., & An, Y. (2009). An empirical study on using hidden markov model for search interface segmentation. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (pp. 17–26).
Naz, T. (2006). An XML schema generator for HTML search interfaces. technical report, Institute Faculty of Informatics, DBAI, Technical University of Vienna, Austria.
Nguyen, H., Nguyen, T., & Freire, J. (2008). Learning to extract form labels. Proceedings of the Very Large Data Bases Endowment, 1(1), 684–694.
Raghavan, S., & Garcia-Molina, H. (2001). Crawling the hidden web. In Proceedings of 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (pp. 129–138).
Saissi, Y., Zellou, A., & Idri, A. (2016). Towards XML schema extraction from deep web. In Proceedings of 4th IEEE International Colloquium on Information Science and Technology (pp. 94–99).
Salem, R., Boussaïd, O., & Darmont, J. (2013). Active XML-based web data integration. Information Systems Frintiers, 15(3), 371–398.
Su, W., Wu, H., Li, Y., Zhao, J., Lochovsky, F. H., Cai, H., & Huang, T. (2013). Understanding query interfaces by statistical parsing. ACM Transactions on the Web, 7(2) Article No. 8.
Wu, W., Doan, A., Yu, C., & Meng, W. (2009). Modeling and extracting deep-web query interfaces. Advances in Information & Intelligent Systems, SCI, 251, 65–90.
Yu, H., & Ye, F. (2015). Research on extract the schema of query interfaces. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering (pp. 442–447).
Zhang, Z., He, B., & Chang, K. C.-C. (2004). Understanding web query interfaces: best-effort parsing with hidden syntax. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD Conference (pp. 107–118).
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments, which greatly assisted improving our work. We also would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (R.O.C.) for financially supporting this research under Grant MOST 105-2221-E-032-062. Our special thanks to Yucheng Cheng, Tzu-Chun Hsiao, and Shang Huang for participating in the design and implementation of the HSE system.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jou, C. Schema Extraction for Deep Web Query Interfaces Using Heuristics Rules. Inf Syst Front 21, 163–174 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-018-9863-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-018-9863-6