Building a Domain Independent Platform for Collecting Domain Specific Data from the Web

Abstract

World Wide Web has become a major information resource for both individuals and institutions. The freedom of presenting data on the Web by HTML makes the information of same domain, such as sales of book, scientific publications etc., be present on many Web sites with diverse format. Thus to collect the data for a particular domain from the Web is not a trivial task, and how to solve the problem is becoming a trendy research area. This talk first gives an overview of this new area by categorizing the information on the Web, and indicating the difficulties in collecting domain specific data from the Web. As a solution, the talk then continues to present a stepwise methodology for collecting domain specific data from the Web, and introduce its supporting system SESQ which is a domain independent tool for building topic specific search engines for applications. The talk shows full features of SESQ by two application examples. In conclusion, the talk briefs further research directions in this new Web data processing area.