Materializing the Web

In this paper we present a novel approach to accessing the Web, that enables automatically acquiring data from Web sites and making them accessible to the user through a database query paradigm. The basic idea is to build, once the user has specified a generic domain of interest, the domain conceptual representation, to instantiate it with data extracted from Web sites (so to build a materialized view over the Web), and to query such a conceptual representation through an easy-to-use visual interface. Knowledge representation techniques are used for both the internal modeling of the conceptual representation and for supporting the automatic extraction of data from Web sites to feed the materialized view. We describe a prototype implementation, focusing on the internal representation of information and on the process for analysing Web sites and acquiring data from them. Our preliminary results support our intuition that, at least for certain kinds of queries, the proposed approach can effectively provide the desired information.