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Representing Web Data as Complex Objects

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Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1875))

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Abstract

The popularization of the Web has made a huge volume of data available for a large audience. In a large number of Web sites, such as bookstores, electronic catalogs, travel agencies, etc., the pages constitute documents which are composed of pieces of data whose overall structure can be easily recognized. Such pages are called data-rich and can be seen as collections of complex objects. In this paper, we show how such objects can be represented by nested tables, which are simple, intuitive, and quite convenient for expressing their implicit structure. The assumption is that, for most sites of interest, only few examples are required to reveal the structure of the objects. To corroborate our assumption, we describe a data extraction tool that adopts this approach and present results of some experiments carried out with this tool.

This work is supported by Project SIAM (grant MCT/FINEP/PRONEX 76.97.1016.00) and by individual research grants from CNPq and CAPES.

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Author information

Author notes

  1. Altigran S. da Silva

    Present address: University of Amazonas, Brazil

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Minas Gerais, 31270-901, Belo Hrizonte MG, Brazil

    Alberto H. F. Laender, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Altigran S. da Silva & Elaine S. Silva

Authors
  1. Alberto H. F. Laender
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  2. Berthier Ribeiro-Neto
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  3. Altigran S. da Silva
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  4. Elaine S. Silva
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IFI, University of Zürich, Winterthurer Str. 190, 8057, Zürich, Switzerland

    Kurt Bauknecht

  2. Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Sanjay Kumar Madria

  3. Department of Information Systems, University of Essen, Universitätsstr. 9, 45141, Essen, Germany

    Günther Pernul

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Laender, A.H.F., Ribeiro-Neto, B., da Silva, A.S., Silva, E.S. (2000). Representing Web Data as Complex Objects. In: Bauknecht, K., Madria, S.K., Pernul, G. (eds) Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies. EC-Web 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1875. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44463-7_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44463-7_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67981-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44463-3

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