Constructing Interface Schemas for Search Interfaces of Web Databases

Many databases have become Web-accessible through form-based search interfaces (i.e., search forms) that allow users to specify complex and precise queries to access the underlying databases. In general, such a Web search interface can be considered as containing an interface schema with multiple attributes and rich semantic/meta information; however, the schema is not formally defined on the search interface. Many Web applications, such as Web database integration and deep Web crawling, require the construction of the schemas. In this paper, we introduce a schema model for complex search interfaces, and present a tool (WISE-iExtractor) for automatically extracting and deriving all the needed information to construct the schemas. Our experimental results on real search interfaces indicate that this tool is highly effective.