The Web is undoubtedly the largest and most diverse repository of data, but it was not designed to offer the capabilities of traditional data base management systems – which is unfortunate. In a true data federation, all types of data sources, such as relational databases and semi-structured Web sites, could be used together. IBM WebSphere uses the “request-reply-compensate” protocol to communi...

The Web so far has been incredibly successful at delivering information to human users. So successful actually, that there is now an urgent need to go beyond a browsing human. Unfortunately, the Web is not yet a well organized repository of nicely structured documents but rather a conglomerate of volatile HTML pages. To address this problem, we present the World Wide Web Wrapper Factory (W4F), ...

This paper presents SGrid, a service-oriented model for the Semantic Grid. Each Grid service in SGrid is a Web service with certain domain knowledge. A Web services oriented wrapper generator has been implemented to automatically wrap legacy codes as Grid services exposed as Web services. Each wrapped Grid service is supplemented with domain ontology and registered with a Semantic Grid Service ...

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 i...

In this paper, we presented a tool to exploit online Web data sources using reconfigurable Web wrapper agents. We described how these agents can be rapidly generated and executed based on the script language WNDL and extraction rule generator IEPAD. WNDL is an XML-based language that provides a representation of a Web browsing session. A WNDL script describes how to locate the data, extract the...

We illustrate basic features of the Lixto wrapper generator such as the user and system interaction, the capacious visual interface, the marking and selecting procedures, and the extraction tasks by describing the construction of a simple example program in the current Lixto prototype.

Biological data sources are useful to bioinformatics researches. Several computational tools have been developed so that these data sources can be used as easily as possible. Most of biological data has been provided over the web. Web data is almost represented in unstructured format and cannot be queried using traditional querying language. Furthermore, the problems, which integration of biolo...

We introduce an innovative approach to wrapping semi-structured web pages in order to generate structured data. Unlike other work in this area based on physically specifying the location of information, our approach is based on human design psychology that captures more stable features across web pages, which we believe renders a more robust result in coping with changes in the web pages. In th...