An Ontology-Based HTML to XML Conversion Using Intelligent Agents

How to organize and classify large amounts of heterogeneous information accessible over the Internet is a major problem faced by industry, government, and military organizations. XML is clearly a potential solution to this problem, [1,2] however, a significant challenge is how to automatically convert information currently expressed in a standard HTML format to an XML format. Within the Virtual Information Processing Agent Research (VIPAR) project, we have developed a process using Internet ontologies and intelligent software agents to perform automatic HTML to XML conversion for Internet newspapers. The VIPAR software is based on a number of significant research breakthroughs. Most notably, the ability for intelligent agents to use a flexible RDF ontology to transform HTML documents to XML tagged documents. The VIPAR system is currently deployed at the US Pacific Command, Camp Smith, HI, traversing up to 17 Internet newspapers daily. 1 The Virtual Information Processing Agent Research (VIPAR) is a software research and development project funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) via Interagency Agreement 2302-Q326-A1 with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The submitted manuscript has been authored by a contractor of the U.S. Government under contract No. DE-AC05-96OR22464. Accordingly, the U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government Purposes.