Lightweight Databases

Current World Wide Web technologies concentrate on presenting documents to human readers. Although HTML identifies structures within a document, it does not allow the semantic content of document sections to be specified explicitly. We investigate a small extension to HTML which allows parts of a document to be mapped onto an underlying database schema. This allows automatic identification and extraction of key information from a web using standard database techniques. Such "lightweight" databases may span servers, with searches being performed at clientor server-side. We have applied this approach to generating "flattened" versions of hypertext documents suitable for printing.