WEDAGEN: A synthetic web database generator

To improve searching and processing of information on the web, a web warehousing system called WHOWEDA is being developed at the Centre for Advanced Information Systems (CAIS). This system incorporates a Web Information Coupling Model that describes the web objects and their relationships and a web algebra consisting of web operators to manipulate the web objects. In order to measure the performance of WHOWEDA and similar systems that manipulate web information, a synthetic web database generator called WEDAGEN (WEb DAtabase GENerator) has been developed. It has the capability of generating web databases of different sizes and complexities determined by a set of user specified parameters. This paper presents the issues in the design and implementation of WEDAGEN. It also gives a detailed description of its system components and the strategy to generate synthetic web databases. A preliminary assessment of the use of WEDAGEN has been reported. 1 Introduction 1.1 Background The Wold Wi..