Extraction and classification of unstructured data in WebPages for structured multimedia database via XML

Nowadays, there is a vast amount of information available in the internet. The useful data must be captured and stored for future purposes. One of the major unsolved problems in the information technology (IT) industry is the management of unstructured data. The unstructured data such as multimedia files, documents, spreadsheets, news, emails, memorandums, reports and web pages are difficult to capture and store in the common database storage. The underlying reason is due to the tools and techniques that proved to be so successful in transforming structured data into business intelligence and actionable information, simply do not work when it comes to unstructured data. As a result, new approaches are necessary. Attempts have been undertaken by several researchers to deal with unstructured data, but, so far it is hard to find a tool that can store and retrieve the extracted and classified unstructured data into a structured database system. This paper is to present our research on unstructured data identification, extraction and classification of web pages, which is then transformed into structured format in Extensible Markup Language (XML) document, and later stored into a multimedia database. The contribution of this research is in the approach of capturing the unstructured data and the efficiency of a multimedia database to handle this kind of data. The stored data could give benefits to various communities such as students, lecturers, researchers and IT managers because it can be used for any planning, decision-making, day-today operations, and other future purposes.