Date: Wednesday, February 03, 1999 12:40 PM
From: Arnaud Sahuguet sahuguet@gradient.cis.upenn.edu
Subject: (DBWORLD) A Java toolkit for generation of ready-to-go Web wrappers
Web: http://db.cis.upenn.edu/W4F
W4F is a toolkit for the generation of wrappers for Web sources.
It consists of a retrieval language to identify Web sources, a
declarative extraction language (HEL: HTML Extraction Language) to
express robust extraction rules and a mapping interface to export the
extracted information into some user-defined data-structures.
To assist the user and make the creation of wrappers rapid and easy,
the toolkit offers some wysiwyg support via some wizards (cgi-scripts).
Together, they permit the fast and semi-automatic generation of
ready-to-go wrappers.
The wrappers are generated as Java classes that can be used as is or
integrated into higher-level applications.
W4F has been successfully used to generate wrappers for database
systems and software agents, making the content of Web sources easily
accessible to any kind of application.
The toolkit comes as a Java package and can be downloaded from the W4F
website. It is free for non-commercial use.
Various examples of wrappers are also available for download.
Web site: http://db.cis.upenn.edu/W4F
Copyright © 1999 KDnuggets