Executive Summary

W4F is a toolkit for the generation of wrappers for Web sources. W4F consists of a retrieval language to identify Web sources, a declarative extraction language (the HTML Extraction Language) to express robust extraction rules and a mapping interface to export the extracted information into some user-defined data-structures. To assist the user and make the creation of wrappers rapid and easy, the toolkit offers some wysiwyg support via some wizards. Together, they permit the fast and semi-automatic generation of ready-to-go wrappers provided as Java classes. W4F has been successfully used to generate wrappers for database systems and software agents, making the content of Web sources easily accessible to any kind of application. W4F Web site
Old Web site

Project Members

Publications

• Building Intelligent Web Applications Using Lightweight Wrappers [abstract] [.ps] [.pdf] 
  Data and Knowledge Engineering (2000)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Fabien Azavant   
  

• Looking at the Web through XML glasses [.ps] [.pdf] [slides/pdf] [slides/ppt] 
  CoopIs'99 (1999)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Fabien Azavant   
  

• Web Ecology: Recycling HTML pages as XML documents using W4F [.ps] [.pdf] 
  International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB) (1999)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Fabien Azavant   
  

• Building light-weight wrappers for legacy Web data-sources using W4F [.ps] [.pdf] 
  International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB) (1999)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Fabien Azavant   
  

• Wysiwyg Web Wrapper Factory (W4F) [.ps] [.pdf] [.html] 
  unpublished (1999)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Fabien Azavant   
  

• Taming the Web with "minute-made" wrappers [.pdf] 
  unpublished (1999)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Fabien Azavant   
  

• Beyond XML Query Languages [.pdf] 
  Query Language Workshop (QL'98) (1998)
  Peter Buneman   Alin Deutsch   Wenfei Fan   Hartmut Liefke   Arnaud Sahuguet   Wang-Chiew Tan   
  

• W4F: a WysiWyg Web Wrapper Factory [.pdf] 
  Technical Report (1998)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Fabien Azavant