An Infrastructure for Creating Web Automation Applications

With the growth of the World Wide Web (WWW), many people nowadays spend a lot of time performing various tasks with browsers, most of these tasks repetitive and tedious. Many applications are created to reorganize and simplify the usage of Web resources, which are called Web automation applications. This paper proposes an infrastructure to create Web automation applications, the WIS (Web Integration Solution) system. WIS integrates a diversity of tools and technologies to provide a software environment for developing Web automation services. Developers can use this tool to create various Web automation applications. We show the versatility of WIS by implementing three exemplary services. The first is a metasearcher system that provides a single search interface for several indexing and abstract databases. The second is a cataloguing tool to simplify the task of retrieving bibliographic data from the Web; this tool is also integrated with a book-recommendation system for libraries. The third is a Web site checking system that periodically checks if some critical Web sites are working correctly, no matter how complex the check procedure is.