WaDer: a middleware system for modeling and searching the Web

Due to the large amount of information made accessible by the explosion of the World Wide Web, new data modeling techniques to exploit such an enormous resource are needed. The absence of a common data representation, the heterogeneous nature of information, and the hypertextual structure of Web documents, make information retrieval difficult to be achieved in an effective way. We present WaDer, a research project, as well as a software system, aiming to provide an integrated environment to model Web contents and to allow for an effective and efficient retrieval of information spread over Web sites. To this end, WaDer exploits middleware database technology to face the problem of data integration, thus viewing the Web as a huge collection of databases. WaDer also provides a proper SQL-like language, WDQL (WaDer Query Language), in order to manage and support such integrated representation.