Free-DOM：A Free-text Document Object Model

Most documents available over the World Wide Web are written in or transformed into HTML. However, HTML is a loosely structured language that mixes presentational style with content. It is therefore important to design ways that can extract data from HTML documents.
In this thesis we propose a method, Free-DOM (a Free-text Documents Object Model), for this purpose. Free-DOM is aimed at extracting data from HTML documents with a similar presentational format. It uses the regular expression to capture the structure of the format that it wants to extract, and the concept of DOM (Document Object Model) to manipulate the extracted data. Thus Free-DOM provides an extraction-and-manipulation language for free-text documents. Free-DOM supports programming languages (such as C++) as a library to pre-process and manipulate documents. It also works as a server-side script language to do value-added applications over the World Wide Web. We show the effectiveness of our method by several examples.