A Flight Meta-Search Engine with Metamorph

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Abstract

We demonstrate a flight meta-search engine that is based on the Metamorph framework. Metamorph provides mechanisms to model web forms together with the interactions which are needed to fulfil a request, and can generate interaction sequences that pose queries using these web forms and collect the results. In this paper, we discuss an interesting new feature that makes use of the forms themselves as an information source. We show how data can be extracted from web forms (rather than the data behind web forms) to generate a graph of flight connections between cities. The flight connection graph allows us to vastly reduce the number of queries that the engine sends to airline websites in the most interesting search scenarios; those that involve the controversial practice of creative ticketing, in which agencies attempt to find lower price fares by using more than one airline for a journey. We describe a system which attains data from a number of websites to identify promising routes and prune the search tree. Heuristics that make use of geographical information and an estimation of cost based on historical data are employed. The results are then made available to improve the quality of future search requests. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.4 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Systems and Software General Terms: Algorithms, Design, Experimentation. Keywords: Hidden Web, Web Data Extraction, Web Form Mapping, Web Form Extraction.