Combining Ontological Knowledge and Wrapper Induction techniques into an e-retail System1

E-commerce and the continuous growth of the WWW has seen the rising of a new generation of e-retail sites. A number of commercial agent-based systems has been developed to help Internet shoppers decide what to buy and where to buy it from. In such systems, ontologies play a crucial role in supporting the exchange of business data, as they provide a formal vocabulary for the information and unify different views of a domain in a shared and safe cognitive approach. In CROSSMARC (a European research project supporting development of an agent-based multilingual/multi-domain system for information extraction (IE) from web pages), a knowledge based approach has been combined with machine learning techniques (in particular, wrapper induction based components) in order to design a robust system for extracting information from relevant web sites. In the ever-changing Web framework this hybrid approach supports adaptivity to new emerging concepts and a certain degree of independence from the specific web-sites considered in the training phase.