Model-Based Integration of Unstructured Web Data Sources Using Graph Representation of Document Contents

Unstructured or semi-structured documents on the web are often used as a media for publishing structured, domain-specific data which is not available from other sources. Integration of such documents as a data source to a standard information system is still a challenging problem because of the very loose structure of the input documents and usually missing semantic annotation of the published data. In this paper, we propose an approach to data integration that exploits the domain model of the target information system. First, we propose a graph-based model of the input document that allows to interpret the contained data in different alternative ways. Further, we propose a method of aligning the document model with the target domain model by evaluating all possible mappings between the two models. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach on a sample domain of public transportation timetables and we present the preliminary results achieved with real-world documents available on the web.