The iCrawl Wizard -- Supporting Interactive Focused Crawl Specification
This is an incremental improvement for researchers and practitioners needing web document collections, as it simplifies the crawl specification process but does not fundamentally change crawling methods.
The paper tackles the problem of requiring manual expertise to specify seed URLs for focused crawlers, which affects collection quality, by introducing the iCrawl Wizard tool that assists users in semi-automatically defining crawls using search engines and APIs, enabling non-experts to create semantic specifications efficiently.
Collections of Web documents about specific topics are needed for many areas of current research. Focused crawling enables the creation of such collections on demand. Current focused crawlers require the user to manually specify starting points for the crawl (seed URLs). These are also used to describe the expected topic of the collection. The choice of seed URLs influences the quality of the resulting collection and requires a lot of expertise. In this demonstration we present the iCrawl Wizard, a tool that assists users in defining focused crawls efficiently and semi-automatically. Our tool uses major search engines and Social Media APIs as well as information extraction techniques to find seed URLs and a semantic description of the crawl intent. Using the iCrawl Wizard even non-expert users can create semantic specifications for focused crawlers interactively and efficiently.