An intelligent system for automatic data extraction in E-Commerce Applications

One of the most frequent uses of Internet is data gathering. Data can be about many themes but perhaps one of the most demanded fields is the tourist information. Normally, databases that support these systems are maintained manually. However, there is other approach, that is, to extract data automatically, for instance, from textual public information existing in the Web. This approach consists of extracting data from textual sources(public or not) and to serve them totally or partially to the user in the form that he/she wants. The obtained data can maintain automatically databases that support different systems as WAP mobile telephones, or commercial systems accessed by Natural Language Interfaces and others. This process has three main actors. The first is the information itself that is present in a particular context. The second is the information supplier (extracting data from the existing information) and the third is the user or information searcher. This added value chain reuse and give value to existing data even in the case that these data were not tough for the last use by the use of the described technology. The main advantage of this approach is that it makes independent the information source from the information user. This means that the original information belongs to a particular context, not necessarily the context of the user. This paper will describe the application based on this approach developed by the authors in the FLEX EXPRIT IV n$^{\circ}$EP29158 in the Work-package "Knowledge Extraction & Data mining"where the information captured from digital newspapers is extracted and reused in tourist information context.