DATA EXTRACTION FROM REPOSITORIES ON THE WEB:A SEMI-AUTOMATIC APPROACH

摘要

The World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming the most important source of information for businessrnintelligence and information dissemination. Past information gathering techniques like surfing andrnsifting are proving insufficient in processing the vast volumes of data readily available from thernWeb. In addition, companies are being forced to integrate this vast data repository within specificrncost, time, and reliability spectrums. This paper presents the fundamentals of a system calledrn“Browser Harness” (B2H) that extracts the requested data from Web sites in a supervised fashion.rnThe algorithmic background of this system is based on the tag structure of web pages, as HTML isrnthe predominate choice for rendering web page content on the WWW. B2H is an interactive toolrnfor harnessing data from semi-structured and structured web pages by analyzing the tag structurernof the input page and locating the data in the HTML code. The extracted data is then exported tornXML, delimited text, or database tables.