Visualizing Real Estate Property Information on the Web

We have designed and are implementing a system called ReV (Real estate Visualiser) for exploring real estate property listings on the world-wide web. Given the large number of different websites providing listings, each with its own presentation format, and the high-dimensionality of the property space itself, it is difficult to obtain a comprehensive single view of property data on the web. ReV addresses this problem by using grammar induction techniques to automatically learn to parse pages from new websites and collate all of their listings together. It them visualizes this listing data using a map-based colorcoding technique. This work draws together a number of strands from the fields of information visualization, machine learning, and database integration. We also hypothesize that ReV will be adaptable to inducing structures from other types of web data.