IWrap: Instant Web Wrapper Generator

In this paper, we describe an automatic Web wrapper generator that creates specification files, which contain the schema information and extraction rules for a class of Web pages. These specification files can then used by a wrapper engine (e.g. MIT COIN Grenouille) to extract information from the semi-structured Web sites. We create specification files through a WYSIWYG GUI with minimal user interaction. Two different algorithms are developed that map the user input to extraction rules in terms of Regular Expressions. We also present example cases used to test the effectiveness of our two approaches.