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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4726–4731Cite as

Wrapper Maintenance

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:

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Synonyms

Wrapper repair; Wrapper verification and reinduction

Definition

A Web wrapper is a software application that extracts information from a semi-structured source and converts it to a structured format. While semi-structured sources, such as Web pages, contain no explicitly specified schema, they do have an implicit grammar that can be used to identify relevant information in the document. A wrapper learning system analyzes page layout to generate either grammar-based or “landmark”-based extraction rules that wrappers use to extract data. As a consequence, even slight changes in the page layout can break the wrapper and prevent it from extracting data correctly. Wrapper maintenance is a composite task that (i) verifies that the wrapper continues to extract data correctly from a source, and (ii) repairs the wrapper so that it works on the changed pages.

Historical Background

Wrapper induction algorithms [3, 6, 11] exploit regularities in the page layout to find a set of...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Kristina Lerman & Craig A. Knoblock

Authors
  1. Kristina Lerman
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  2. Craig A. Knoblock
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kristina Lerman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Computing Lab., Oxford Univ., Oxford, UK

    Georg Gottlob

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Lerman, K., Knoblock, C.A. (2018). Wrapper Maintenance. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1158

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