A workflow-based approach for creating complex web wrappers

Abstract

In order to let software programs access and use the information and services provided by web sources, wrapper programs must be built to provide a "machine-readable" view over them. Although research literature on web wrappers is vast, the problem of how to specify the internal logic of complex wrappers in a graphical and simple way remains mainly ignored. In this paper, we propose a new language for addressing this task. Our approach leverages on the existing work on intelligent web data extraction and automatic web navigation as building blocks, and uses a workflow-based approach to specify the wrapper control logic. The features included in the language have been decided from the results of a study of a wide range of real web automation applications from different business areas. In this paper, we also present the most salient results of the study. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.