Block-o-Matic: A web page segmentation framework

In this paper we describe Block-o-Matic, a web page segmentation framework. It is a hybrid approach inspired by automated document processing methods and visual-based content segmentation techniques. A web page is associated with three structures: the DOM tree, the content structure and the logical structure. The DOM tree represents the HTML elements of a page, the content structure organizes page objects according to content´s categories and geometry and finally the logical structure is the result of mapping content structure on the basis of the human-perceptible meaning that conforms the blocks. The logic structure represents the final segmentation. The segmentation process is divided into three phases: analysis, understanding and reconstruction of a web page. An evaluation is proposed in order to perform the evaluation of web page segmentations based on a ground truth of 400 pages classified into 16 categories. Block-o-Matic gives promising results.