Integrating semi-structured data into business applications: A Web intelligence example

Abstract

The World Wide Web, representing a universe of knowledge, provides public domain information about market developments and competitor activities on the market. This information is becoming more and more a critical success factor for enterprises and can be retrieved for example from Web sites or online shops. The extraction from these semi-structured information sources is mostly done manually and is very time consuming. Therefore, powerful and user-friendly tools for extracting and integrating information from various different Web sources, or in general, various heterogeneous semi-structured data sources are needed. In this paper we describe a solution how data from public information sources, in particular from the World Wide Web, can be retrieved and normalized to structured data formats automatically. We also illustrate how this data can be automatically integrated afterwards in - often complex - Web Intelligence applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.