A Block-based Graph Model for Effective Wrapper Maintenance

Abstract

The wrapper is a special program which can automatically extract the information from the web pages which has a structured form. Most of the web pages are changed frequently and grow constantly. The structure of the web page is also changed frequently. The wrapper which is created before may not extract the information accurately from the changed web pages. In case that the structure of a web page is changed, even though wrapping operations are performed on the same information, the wrapper may not extract information practically. To solve this problem, we propose the novel method that segments a web page into visual block units and compose them as graph model. As a result, the graph model would be efficient wrapper management. The existing wrapper can extract the target information through the comparison of the graph model with the new one even if the structure of web page is changed.