Crawling deep web content through query forms

TL;DR: This paper proposes the concept of Minimum Executable Pattern (MEP), and then presents a MEP generation method and a MEP-based Deep Web adaptive query method that outperforms existing methods in terms of query capability and applicability.

Abstract: This paper proposes the concept of Minimum Executable Pattern (MEP), and then presents a MEP generation method and a MEP-based Deep Web adaptive query method. The query method extends query interface from single textbox to MEP set, and generates local-optimal query by choosing a MEP and a keyword vector of the MEP. Our method overcomes the problem of “data islands” to a certain extent which results from deficiency of current methods. The experimental results on six real-world Deep Web sites show that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of query capability and applicability.