%0 Report
%9 Technical Report
%A Hammer, J.
%A Garcia-Molina, H.
%A Cho, J.
%A Aranha, R.
%A Crespo, A.
%D 1997
%F ilprints:250
%I Stanford InfoLab
%T Extracting Semistructured Information from the Web.
%U http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/250/
%X We describe a configurable tool for extracting semistructured data from a set of HTML pages andfor converting the extracted information into database objects.  The input to the extractor is adeclarative specification that states where the data of interest is located on the HTML pages, andhow the data should be packaged into objects.  We have implemented the Web extractor usingthe Python programming language stressing efficiency and ease-of-use.  We also describe variousways of improving the functionality of our current prototype.  The prototype is installed andrunning in the TSIMMIS testbed as part of a DARPA I3 (Intelligent Integration of Information)technology demonstration where it is used for extracting weather data form various WWW sites.