A data model for structuring and manipulating Web page databases

Recent success of WWW has led to popularity of Web-oriented information retrieval. Two obstacles that affect the access to Web data is the unstructured Web pages and the heterogeneous distributed information sources. To address the problems, we propose a data model to structure, store and manipulate large amount of Web pages in a Web database. The model provides multiple navigation/indexing hierarchies to speedup keyword searching and user query. Moreover, it is an alternative to conventional relational and object-oriented data model. Therefore, it supports for heterogeneous database integration. This paper presents the environment, motivation, and description of the new data model. The functionality and benefits of the model are also discussed.