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Indexing and querying segmented web pages: the BlockWeb Model

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Abstract

We present in this paper a model for indexing and querying web pages, based on the hierarchical decomposition of pages into blocks. Splitting up a page into blocks has several advantages in terms of page design, indexing and querying such as (i) blocks of a page most similar to a query may be returned instead of the page as a whole (ii) the importance of a block can be taken into account, as well as (iii) the permeability of the blocks to neighbor blocks: a block b is said to be permeable to a block b′ in the same page if b′ content (text, image, etc.) can be (partially) inherited by b upon indexing. An engine implementing this model is described including: the transformation of web pages into blocks hierarchies, the definition of a dedicated language to express indexing rules and the storage of indexed blocks into an XML repository. The model is assessed on a dataset of electronic news, and a dataset drawn from web pages of the ImagEval campaign where it improves by 16% the mean average precision of the baseline.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LSIS, Université du Sud Toulon-Var, BP 20132, 83957, La Garde Cedex, France

    Emmanuel Bruno, Hervé Glotin & Jacques Le Maitre

  2. LSIS, Université Paul Cézanne, Avenue Escadrille Normandie-Niemen, 13397, Marseille Cedex 20, France

    Nicolas Faessel

  3. Cedric/Wisdom, CNAM, 292 Rue St Martin, 75141, Paris Cedex 03, France

    Michel Scholl

Authors
  1. Emmanuel Bruno
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  2. Nicolas Faessel
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  3. Hervé Glotin
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  4. Jacques Le Maitre
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  5. Michel Scholl
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Correspondence to Emmanuel Bruno.

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Bruno, E., Faessel, N., Glotin, H. et al. Indexing and querying segmented web pages: the BlockWeb Model. World Wide Web 14, 623–649 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-011-0124-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-011-0124-6

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