Structuring the Web

The WWW is a very large and rich information source but with no structure, so locating data of interest may be difficult. In particular a page may be divided into different logical sections of information, whose highlighting may improve both browsing and searching. We propose a simple Web page structuring, by introducing the “semantic block” as a more granular level to categorize information inside a page. We also propose a set of XML tags to be added to the existing HTML tags in order to locate such blocks and to use structured pages both with current and future, structure-aware browsers, reaching the goal of a gradual migration towards a more structured Web. We explore our technique on several Web sites, in order to detect which semantic blocks are needed, also using two simple Java-based tools we developed to add XML tags and manage such structure. Finally, we consider how schema can be represented for a better browsing