Re-engineering structures from Web documents

To realize a wide range of applications (including digital libraries) on the Web, a more structured way of accessing the Web is required and such requirement can be facilitated by the use of XML standard. In this paper, we propose a general framework for reverse engineering (or re-engineering) the underlying structures i.e.,the DTD from a collection of similarly structured XML documents when they share some common but unknown DTDs. The essential data structures and algorithms for the DTD generation have been delveloped and experiments on real Web collections have been conducted to demonstrate their feasibilty. In addition, we also proposed a method ofimposing a constraint on the repetitiveness on the element in a DTD rule to further simplify the generated DTD without compromising their correctness.