On a Declarative Semantics for Web Queries

. With the increasing importance of the World Wide Web as an information source, there is a growing interest for integration of Web and database technology. Several Web query languages have been presented to overcome the shortcomings of conventional search engines, most of them lacking a formal semantics. In this paper, we propose F-logic as a means to explore, query and restructure Web information, and to integrate it with a local database. Two major advantages of this approach are its declarative semantics, based on the semantics of F-logic, and the rich modeling capabilities which make F-logic particularly suitable to handle heterogeneous data. The presented semantics directly yields a bottom-up evaluation algorithm that can be easily incorporated into the existing F-logic prototype Florid.