Automatic Acquisition of Digitized Newspapers via Internet

After our previous works on modelling a database of newspapers and designing a specially suited retrieval language, we are now developing an application to automatically acquire, summarize and store newspaper documents published in distinct web resources. This paper describes the current implementation of the acquisition process which includes the recognison of document types and the abstraction of the recognised document values. The network agents in charge of such a process are called gatherers, accordingly to the terminology used in successful web retrieval systems such as Harvest. To implement gatherers we have combined a context free grammar with some web traversing techniques, which are available in most of the current PROLOG systems (e.g. Sicstus with the library PiLLoW).