A Semantic Scraping Model for Web Resources - Applying Linked Data to Web Page Screen Scraping

In spite of the increasing presence of Semantic Web Facilities, only a limited amount of the available resources in the Internet provide a semantic access. Recent initiatives such as the emerging Linked Data Web are providing semantic access to available data by porting existing resources to the semantic web using different technologies, such as database-semantic mapping and scraping. Nevertheless, existing scraping solutions are based on ad-hoc solutions complemented with graphical interfaces for speeding up the scraper development. This article proposes a generic framework for web scraping based on semantic technologies. This framework is structured in three levels: scraping services, semantic scraping model and syntactic scraping. The first level provides an interface to generic applications or intelligent agents for gathering information from the web at a high level. The second level defines a semantic RDF model of the scraping process, in order to provide a declarative approach to the scraping task. Finally, the third level provides an implementation of the RDF scraping model for specific technologies. The work has been validated in a scenario that illustrates its application to mashup technologies.