A Virtual Catalog Generated from Web Pages of Vendors for Comparative Shopping

Latest generations of catalogs for comparative shopping connect to multiple Web sites and collect the information requested by the user. It´s necessary for these models to get access grant from vendors before to access their databases and retrieve the requested information. Some vendors may not give access grant to their databases; thus, their products´ information cannot be retrieved; so, the information provided by these models is not as complete as we would expect. In this paper, we propose an approach to extract the products´ information and the vendors´ prices from their public Web sites´ pages. Most vendors on the Web present their products´ information in HTML documents that are not semantic formats. However, our approach is based on understanding semantics of HTML documents and extracting the information automatically