Visual Data Alignment for Search Engine Results Pages

Visual wrappers use visual information in addition to the DOM Tree properties in the extraction of data records. However, a closer look indicates that visual information can also be used to align data records into tabular form. In this paper, we propose a data alignment algorithm to align data records using DOM Tree properties and visual cue of data records. Our data alignment algorithm uses a regular expression rule and incorporates visual cue such as relative position and size of data items to provide options for the alignment of iterative and disjunctive data items. Results show that our wrapper performs better than existing state of the art wrappers.