The Road Runner Project
Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites

Mirror Site at Roma Tre:: http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/db/roadRunner
Mirror Site at Università della Basilicata:: http://www.difa.unibas.it/roadRunner

Description:

Road Runner is a combined project of the Database Group of Università di Roma Tre and of the Database Group of Università della Basilicata. The project investigates techniques for extracting data from HTML sites through the use of automatically generated wrappers. In fact, many Web-based applications today use wrappers to extract data from HTML pages. These wrappers, however, are usually coded by hand, and therefore their generation and maintenance are difficult and labor intensive. To automate the wrapper generation and the data extraction process, the Road Runner project aims at developing original techniques to automatically generate wrappers.

A wrapper generation system has been implemented in a working prototype, which has been used to conduct a number of experiments on real-life data-intensive Web sites. These experiments confirm the feasibility of the approach and. The system prototype has been implemented in Java.

On-Line Resources:

Publications
Papers, Technical Reports and unpublished manuscripts related to the project;
Experimental Results
Some of the wrappers that have been automatically generated by our system prototype
Downloads
We have released under GPL the source code of the roadRunner system.

 


This page is maintained by Gianni Mecca and Paolo Merialdo
Road Runner: geococcyx californianus