Automating website profiling for a deep web search engine

The deep web consists of information on the internet that resides in databases or is dynamically generated. It is believed that the deep web represents a large percentage of the total contents on the web, but is currently not indexed by traditional search engines. The Morpheus project is designed to solve this problem by making information in the deep web searchable. This requires a large repository of content sources to be built up, where each source is represented in Morpheus by a profile or wrapper. This research proposes an approach to automating the creation of wrappers by relying on the average internet user to identify relevant sites. A wrapper generation system was created based on this approach. It comprises two components: the clickstream recorder saves characteristic data for websites identified by users, and the wrapper constructor converts these data into wrappers for the Morpheus system. After completing the implementation of this system, user tests were conducted, which verified that the system is effective and has good usability.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Yuan, Jeffrey W. (Jeffrey Weijie)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael Stonebraker.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/53187

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/53187