Wrapping Data into XML

The vast majority of information that is available on-line, and coming online in this near future is only avail-able in HTML. In order to use this information for more than human browsing, it must be converted into a machine-readable format. Wrappers have been the key tool to make the conversion from HTML into se-mantically meaningful and well-structured XML data. However, developing wrappers is slow and tedious work with typically brittle results. This paper de-scribes XWRAP Elite, a tool to automatically gen-erate robust wrappers, which breaks down the conver-sion process into three procedures: discovering where the data is located in an HTML page and separating the data into individual objects; decomposing objects into data elements; marking objects and elements in an output format. XWRAP Elite automates the rst two procedures and requires minimal human involve-ment in marking output data. In addition, there is a code generation component to package all of the pieces into a stand-alone wrapper.