Information distributed through the Web keeps growing faster day by day, and for this reason, several techniques for extracting Web data have been suggested during last years. Often, extraction tasks are performed through so called wrappers, procedures extracting information from Web pages, e.g. implementing logic-based techniques. Many fields of application today require a strong degree of robustness of wrappers, in order not to compromise assets of information or reliability of data extracted.
We survey the problem of comparing labeled trees based on simple local operations of deleting, inserting, and relabeling nodes. These operations lead to the tree edit distance, alignment distance, and inclusion problem. For each problem we review the results available and present, in detail, one or more of the central algorithms for solving the problem. The tree-to-tree correctmn problem Is to determine, for two labeled ordered trees T and T', the distance from T to T' as measured by the mlmmum cost sequence of edit operaUons needed to transform T into T' The edit operations investigated allow changing one node of a tree into another node, deleting one node from a tree, or inserting a node into a tree An algorithm Is presented which solves this problem m time O(V* V'*LZ* L'2), where V and V' are the numbers of nodes respectively of T and T', and L and L' are the maximum depths respectively of T and T' Possible apphcatmns are to the problems of measuring the similarity between trees, automatic error recovery and correction for programming languages, and determining the largest common substructure of two trees