User-friendly and Extensible Web Data Extraction

Creation of web wrappers is a subject of study in the field of web data extraction. Designing a domain-specific language for a web wrapper is a challenging task, because it introduces trade-offs between expressiveness of a wrapper’s language and safety. In addition, little attention has been paid to execution of a wrapper in a restricted environment.In this paper we present a new wrapping language -- Serrano -- that has three goals: (1) ability to run in a restricted environment, such as a browser extension, (2) extensibility to balance the tradeoffs between expressiveness of a command set and safety, and (3) processing capabilities to eliminate the need for additional programs to clean the extracted data. Serrano has been successfully deployed in a number of projects and provided encouraging results