LIGHTWEIGHT DATABASES

Current World-Wide Web technologies concentrate on presenting document s to human readers. Although HTML identifies structures within a docum ent, it does not allow the semantic content of document sections to be specified explicitly. We investigate a small extension to HTML which allows parts of a document to be mapped onto an underlying database sc hema. This allows automatic identification and extraction of key infor mation from a web using standard database techniques. Such ''lightweig ht'' databases may span servers, with searches being performed at clie nt- or server-side. We have applied this approach to generating ''flat tened'' versions of hypertext documents suitable for printing.