Pollock: Automatic Generation of Virtual Web Services from Web Sites

As the usage of Web Services proliferates dramatically, new tools to help quickly generate web services are needed. In this paper, we propose a methodology that helps to automatically generate Web Services from the FORMbased query interfaces of a web site. Since the majority of web data are rather “hidden ” behind such a FORM interface, we believe turning such a human-oriented query interface into machine-oriented web services is an important problem. Toward this goal, we adopt the Wrapper technology successfully developed and deployed in Database community, and demonstrate how to generate Web Services components (e.g., WSDL, UDDI, SOAP) automatically. We present the overall architecture of our developed prototype and a few showcases based on real web sites