WebQL Turns the Web Into A Giant Database

An anonymous reader says " This article was posted on ZDNet by Bill Machrone on a new type of query language for aggregating information from the Web." Somewhat light on the details, but definitely something to think about.

Comments

Yeah, okay.

[1010011010]

How will this be different from Google's back-end query interface? I ask, because I can't imagine someone making a "screen-scraping" search engine that returns bits of data and not just a link. They will probably get sued by the owners of the purloined content. Plus, parsing HTML to extract one little field of data is tricky, and highly dependant on the layout of the page. I've written a number of things to do just that, from Amazon, IMDB, Borders, finance.Yahoo.com, etc., for my own purposes. I wrote them in both C and Perl. It's a job keeping the filters updated to accomodate the changes in page layout style, regardless of language. Good luck to them and all, but until we have an XML + XSL web, with standard DTDs for the XML, forget it.


________________________________________

just a pretty interface

[_|()|\|]

I grab the html and apply various forms of on the fly text processing

I downloaded the WebQL Business Edition manual. Here's an abbreviated version of the first example query:

select
text("(\(206\)\s+\d{3}-\d{4})","","","T")
from
http://foo/bar.html
where
approach=sequence("1","10","1","XX")

The select clause accepts a variety of functions, of which text() seems to be the most useful. You can see that the first argument is a regex designed to match phone numbers. The from clause is an URL. The where clause primarily takes the approach "descriptor," which can crawl or guess new URLs.

So basically, it doesn't do anything a Perl script can't. It just presents a simpler interface.

Freely-Available Web Query Languages

[Ellen Spertus]

For my thesis, I created a Web query system called ParaSite. The best introduction is the paper Squeal: A Structured Query Language for the Web, which I presented at the World-Wide Web Conference. Anybody is welcome to use my code, algorithms, or ideas.

See also WebSQL and W3QL, which also come from academia.

goof?

[fluxrad]

>drop table internet;
OK, 135454265363565609860398636678346496
rows affected.

"oh fuck"


FluX
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