A declarative language for querying and restructuring the Web

World Wide Web is a hypertext based, distributed information system that provides access to vast amounts of information in the Internet. A fundamental problem with the Web is the difficulty of retrieving specific information of interest to the user, from the enormous number of resources that are available. We develop a simple logic called WebLog that is capable of retrieving information from HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) documents in the Web. WebLog is inspired by SchemaLog, a logic for multidatabase interoperability. We demonstrate the suitability of WebLog for: querying and restructuring Web information; exploiting partial knowledge users might have on the information being queried; and dealing with the dynamic nature of information in the Web. We illustrate the simplicity and power of WebLog using a variety of applications involving real life information in the Web.