Reuse of linked documents through virtual document prescriptions

Abstract

As the WWW becomes a major source of information, a lot of interest has arisen, not only for searching for information, but for reusing this information in new pages, or directly within applications. Unfortunately HTML tags do not provide a significant level of structure for identifying and extracting information, since they are mostly used for presentation issues. Moreover the simple link mechanism of the Web does not support the controlled traversal of links to related pages. Particularly promising is the proposal for a new standard, XML, which could bring the power of SGML to the Web while keeping the simplicity of HTML. In this paper we present a system and a language that allow reusing of information from various sources, including databases and SGML-like documents, by combining it dynamically to produce a virtual document. The language uses a treelike structure for the representation of the information objects as well as link objects. The paper focuses on the selection and the traversal of XML links to extract information from linked pages. The strength of our approach is to be an SGML-compliant solution, which makes it ready to take full advantage of XML for reusing information from the Web as soon as it is widely used.