Building light-weight wrappers
for legacy Web data-sources using W4F

Table of Contents

Building light-weight wrappers for legacy Web data-sources using W4F

Motivation

Why bother? We already have XML.

Our contribution: Web wrappers

Put the glasses on

Put the glasses on

» If you please – draw me a wrapper...«

The Wrapper is inside the box

W4F wrapper architecture

World Wide Web Wrapper Factory (W4F)

HTML Extraction Language (HEL)

Tree navigation

2 ways to navigate the tree

Using conditions

Using regular expressions

Building Complex Structures

Mapping the extracted information

W4F Mappings

XML Templates

The full wrapper

GUI support: Extraction Wizard

GUI support: Applet Wizard

Experience with W4F

W4F Contributions

Related and Future Work

Home Page: http://db.cis.upenn.edu/W4F

PowerPoint file, Postscript file, PDF file

Go to the demo

The set of slides "Demo" try to re-create the live demonstration presented at VLDB. For some technical and legal reasons, we cannot put the applet used for the demonstration as part of this electronic publication.
However, you can dowload the W4F toolkit from our Web site and play with the various examples located there (the demo example can be found here).

For any question concerning the World Wide Web Wrapper Factory, feel free to contact us.