Extracting Room Prices from Web Tables - an Ontology-Aware Approach

The growing amount of semi-structured and unstructured data on tourism Web sites with heterogeneous designs requires information extraction (IE) mechanisms, to create, for instance, tourism portals. In order to build semantic eTourism environments, the acquisition of room prices is of particular interest. Room prices and related information often appear in tabular structures, which still challenge Web information extraction techniques. In this paper, we begin by identifying various price table patterns which are characterized by the position of a number of features that determine a room price. We then describe an extended ontology model for tourism prices. Finally, we present TAINEX, a plug-in for functional and structural analysis and data interpretation of price tables, which extends the existing prototype TourIE, a rule-/ontology-based information extraction system for Web sites with heterogeneous designs.