ODE: Ontology-assisted data extraction

Online databases respond to a user query with result records encoded in HTML files. Data extraction, which is important for many applications, extracts the records from the HTML files automatically. We present a novel data extraction method, ODE (Ontology-assisted Data Extraction), which automatically extracts the query result records from the HTML pages. ODE first constructs an ontology for a domain according to information matching between the query interfaces and query result pages from different Web sites within the same domain. Then, the constructed domain ontology is used during data extraction to identify the query result section in a query result page and to align and label the data values in the extracted records. The ontology-assisted data extraction method is fully automatic and overcomes many of the deficiencies of current automatic data extraction methods. Experimental results show that ODE is extremely accurate for identifying the query result section in an HTML page, segmenting the query result section into query result records, and aligning and labeling the data values in the query result records. © 2009 ACM.