WebDB: a Web query system and its modeling, language, and implementation

The World-Wide Web can be viewed as a collection of multimedia documents in the form of Web pages connected through hyperlinks. Unlike most Web search engines, which primarily focus on information retrieval functionality, WebDB aims at supporting more comprehensive database-like query functionality, including selection, aggregation, sorting, summary, grouping, and projection on (1) document level information, such as title, URL, length, keywords, types, and last modified date; (2) intra-document structures, such as tables, forms, and images; and (3) inter-document linkage information, such as destination URLs and anchors. With these three types of information, more comprehensive queries, such as “list all Web pages which link to the NEC Web sites containing a form and a keyword multimedia within link depth of 3 and group these Web pages by country” can be supported. A novel visual query/browsing interface of WebDB, WebIFQ, is presented for demonstrating the high usability of this system