KPS: a Web Information Mining Algorithm

The Web mostly contains semi-structured information. It is, however, not easy to search and extract structural data hidden in a Web page. Current practices address this problem by (1) syntax analysis (i.e. HTML tags); or (2) wrappers or user-defined declarative languages. The former is only suitable for highly structured Web sites and the latter is time-consuming and offers low scalability. Wrappers could handle tens, but certainly not thousands, of information sources. In this paper, we present a novel information mining algorithm, namely KPS, over semi-structured information on the Web. KPS employs keywords, patterns and=or samples to mine the desired information. Experimental results show that KPS is more efficient than existing Web extracting methods.  1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.