A Relational Database Interface to the World-Wide Web

摘要

The World-Wide Web contains an abundance of semi-structured information, including hyperlinks between pages, structure within hypertext pages, and structure within the addresses of pages (URLs). Existing Web tools often fail to take advantage of this information, because there has been no clean way to specify or evaluate queries involving multiple types of structure. We describe a relational database interface to the Web that we have designed and implemented, which allows users to query the Web in Structured Query Language (SQL) as though it were in a relational database. We present a description of our interface and describe a "ParaSite" built on top of it to find personal home pages.