Gadget creation for personal information integration on web portals

Abstract

Although the ever growing Web contain information to virtually every user’s query, it does not guarantee effectively accessing to those information. In many situations, the users still have to do a lot of browsing in order to fuse the information needed. In this paper, we propose the idea of gadget creation such that extracted data can be immediately reused on personal portals by existing presentation components, like map, calendar, table and lists, etc. The underlying technique is an unsupervised web data extraction approach, FivaTech, which has been proposed to wrap data (usually in xml format). Despite the efforts to utilize supervised web data extraction in RSS feed burning like OpenKapow and Dapper, there’s no research on incorporating unsupervised extraction method for RSS feeds or gadget creation. The advanced application in gadget creation allow immediate use by users and can be embedded to any web sites, especially Web portals (personal desktop on Web). This paper describes our initiatives in working towards a personal information integration service where light-weight software can be created without programming.