Wrapping Data into XML

The vast majority of information that is available online, and coming online in this near future is only available in HTML. In order to use this information for more than human browsing, it must be converted into a machine-readable format. Wrappers have been the key tool to make the conversion from HTML into semantically meaningful and well-structured XML data. However, developing wrappers is slow and tedious work with typically brittle results. This paper describes XWRAP Elite, a tool to automatically generate robust wrappers, which breaks down the conversion process into three procedures: discovering where the data is located in an HTML page and separating the data into individual objects; decomposing objects into data elements; marking objects and elements in an output format. XWRAP Elite automates the rst two procedures and requires minimal human involvement in marking output data. In addition, there is a code generation component to package all of the pieces into a stand-alone wrapper.