Extracting company information from the web

As World Wide Web is becoming the most important information repository, increasing amount of information is available. Currently, web search engines can only provide document oriented searches. In order to fully make use of information from the web, some effective and efficient extraction algorithms are definitely desirable. In this paper, some existing achievements are investigated firstly. Then our current technique on web information extraction is discussed in detail. In our approach, rules and patterns are extracted from sample pages through training process, with human involvements. We use both keywords and regular expressions to represent rules and patterns in our system. The keywords work as anchors to locate the positions of the potential information and regular expressions work as validations of the values. In our system, all the extracted information is represented in XML format.