Supporting unified interface to wrapper generator in Integrated Information Retrieval

Given the ever-increasing scale and diversity of information and applications on the Internet, improving the technology of information retrieval is an urgent research objective. Retrieved information is either semi-structured or unstructured in format and its sources are extremely heterogeneous. In consequence, the task of efficiently gathering and extracting information from documents can be both difficult and tedious. Given this variety of sources and formats, many choose to use mediator/wrapper architecture (Y. Papakonstantinou, A. Gupta, H. Garcia-Molina, J. Ullman, A Query Translation Scheme for Rapid Implementation of Wrappers, International Conference on Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases, Singapore, 1995), but its use demands a fast means of generating efficient wrappers. In this paper, we present a design for an automatic eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based framework with which to generate wrappers rapidly. Wrappers created with this framework support a unified interface for a meta-search information retrieval system based on the Internet Search Service using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard. Greatly advantaged by the compatibility of CORBA and XML, a user can quickly and easily develop information-gathering applications, such as a meta-search engine or any other information source retrieval method. The two main things our design provides are a method of wrapper generation that is fast, simple, and efficient, and a wrapper generator that is CORBA and XML-compliant and that supports a unified interface. D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.