The RoadRunner Web Data Extraction System

Extracting data from HTML text files and making them available to computer applications is becoming of utmost importance for developing several emerging e-services. This paper presents RoadRunner, a research project that aims at developing solutions for automatically extracting data from large HTML data sources. We concentrate on data-intensive Web sites, that is, sites that deliver large amounts of data through a complex graph of linked HTML pages. The paper describes the top-level software architecture of the RoadRunner System, which has been specifically designed to automatize the data extraction process. The paper is organized as follows. First, Section 2 illustrates an overview of the project and gives an intuition of its key ideas. Then, Section 3 describes the overall architecture of the RoadRunner system. Section 4 concludes the paper discussing related works.