Research project

The Internet offers a vast pool of information. This information is primarily presented in a format for human readers. There are several good reasons why this huge amount of data should be integrated into applications instead, e.g. for processing it or comparing it with other sources/experiences. Extracting this information from websites is not trivial because what human eyes can perceive quite easily is most of the time rather complicated HTML code. The task of extracting information from websites is in general left to so called wrappers: they have to communicate with a site, retrieve the information from it and transform it to a format a higher level application desires. XWeb (eXtract WEB-sites) is a wrapper framework completely relying on open standards like XML and XSLT. The benefit is twofold: the full power of the expressiveness of XSLT can be used for the extraction process itself and not another query language has to be learnt.