Method of creating web services from web applications

Web 2.0 is becoming popular among people who are interested in creating or providing more useful services on the Internet. Mashup is one of the most important methods in Web 2.0, which creates services by combining components on the Internet, such as Web services. Mashup enables many people to create various services easily and use services created by many other people. To create such a variety of useful services, we need a large number of components, but there are not so many components available on the Internet yet. We describe an effective method of creating wrappers that make Web applications usable as Web services. The method extracts important segments, such as search results of a hotel search application, from an HTML document generated by the web application and generates extraction rules for the wrappers. This extraction is performed by using the characteristic depth of each tag in the HTML document.