Clustering web pages based on their structure

  • Authors:

  • Valter Crescenzi;Paolo Merialdo;Paolo Missier

  • Affiliations:

  • Dipartimento di Informatica e Automazione, Università Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale, 79, Roma 00146, Italy;Dipartimento di Informatica e Automazione, Università Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale, 79, Roma 00146, Italy;Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

  • Venue:
  • Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special issue: WIDM 2003
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Several techniques have been recently proposed to automatically generate Web wrappers, i.e., programs that extract data from HTML pages, and transform them into a more structured format, typically in XML. These techniques automatically induce a wrapper from a set of sample pages that share a common HTML template. An open issue, however, is how to collect suitable classes of sample pages to feed the wrapper inducer. Presently, the pages are chosen manually. In this paper, we tackle the problem of automatically discovering the main classes of pages offered by a site by exploring only a small yet representative portion of it. We propose a model to describe abstract structural features of HTML pages. Based on this model, we have developed an algorithm that accepts the URL of an entry point to a target Web site, visits a limited yet representative number of pages, and produces an accurate clustering of pages based on their structure. We have developed a prototype, which has been used to perform experiments on real-life Web sites.