Learning to Invoke Web Forms

Emerging Web standards promise a network of heterogeneous yet interoperable Web Services. Web Services would greatly simplify the development of many kinds of data integration systems, information agents and knowledge management applications. Unfortunately, this vision requires that services provide substantial quantities of explicit semantic metadata “glue”. As a step to automatically generating such metadata, we present an algorithm that learns to attach semantic labels to Web forms, and evaluate our approach on a large collection real Web data. The key idea is to cast Web form classification as Bayesian learning and inference over a generative model of the Web form design process.