Reconfigurable Web Wrapper Agents

directly access the data. Web wrappers, however, must automate Web browsing sessions to extract data from the target Web pages so other applications can process that data. Each Web site has its own set of links, layout templates, and syntax. You could, in a brute-force solution, program a wrapper for each browsing session. However, such wrappers are sensitive to Web site changes and become difficult to scale and maintain. We have developed a solution called the DeepSpot Agent Toolbox for rapidly generating intelligent agents that serve as Web wrappers for Web information integration. With this solution, Web wrapper agents can be easily maintained without skillful programmers. We’ve built various applications that demonstrate our approach’s feasibility. Here, we describe a bioinformatics application and a largescale e-government information integration task.