Querying Websites Using Compact Skeletons

Several commercial applications, such as online comparison shopping and process automation, require integrating information that is scattered across multiple websites or XML documents. Much research has been devoted to this problem, resulting in several research prototypes and commercial implementations. Such systems rely on wrappers that provide relational or other structured interfaces to websites. Traditionally, wrappers have been constructed by hand on a per-website basis, constraining the scalability of the system. We introduce a website structure inference mechanism called compact skeletons that is a step in the direction of automated wrapper generation. Compact skeletons provide a transformation from websites or other hierarchical data, such as XML documents, to relational tables. We study several classes of compact skeletons and provide polynomialtime algorithms and heuristics for automated construction of compact skeletons from websites. Experimental results show that our heu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: PODS
• Authors: Anand Rajaraman, Jeffrey D. Ullman
• Keywords: Compact Skeletons, Database, PODS 2001, Structure Inference Mechanism, XML Documents