Understanding Web Query Interfaces: Best-Effort Parsing with Hidden Syntax

Recently, the Web has been rapidly "deepened" by many searchable databases online, where data are hidden behind query forms. For modelling and integrating Web databases, the very first challenge is to understand what a query interface says? or what query capabilities a source supports. Such automatic extraction of interface semantics is challenging, as query forms are created autonomously. Our approach builds on the observation that, across myriad sources, query forms seem to reveal some "concerted structure," by sharing common building blocks. Toward this insight, we hypothesize the existence of a hidden syntax that guides the creation of query interfaces, albeit from different sources. This hypothesis effectively transforms query interfaces into a visual language with a non-prescribed grammar? and, thus, their semantic understanding a parsing problem. Such a paradigm enables principled solutions for both declaratively representing common patterns, by a derived gr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Zhen Zhang, Bin He, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang
• Keywords: Database, Query Capabilities, Query Forms, Query Interfaces, SIGMOD 2004