Enhancing Wrapper Usability through Ontology Sharing and Large Scale Cooperation

The htmlButler project aims at enhancing the usability of visual wrapper technology while preserving versatility. htmlButler will allow, for an untrained user who has only the most basic web knowledge, to visually specify simple but useful wrappers and, for a more tech-savvy user, to visually or otherwise specify more complex wrappers. htmlButler was started 2005/2 and is based on visual wrapping technology research carried out in the Lixto project since 2000. What is new in htmlButler is that (a) the application is entirely server based, the user accessing it through his or her standard browser, (b) because of the centralized wrap- per configuration and processing, the knowledge about popular wrappers can be leveraged to facilitate the specification of wrappers for new users, and (c) users can contribute narrow and precise ontologies that help the system in recognizing potential meaning in web pages, thereby alleviating the complexity of future wrapper configurations