SAID SHEHATA

The Internet presents a huge amount of useful information which is usually formatted for its users, which makes it difficult to extract relevant data from various sources. Therefore, the availability of robust, flexible Information Extraction (IE) systems that transform the Web pages into program-friendly structures will become a great necessity. Although many approaches for data extraction from Web pages have been developed, there has been limited effort to compare such tools. In addition to briefly surveying the major data extraction approaches described in the literature,the paper also mainly presenting three classes of criteria for qualitatively analyzing these approaches. The criteria of the first class are concerned with the difficulties of an IE task, so these criteria are capable of determining why an IE system fails to handle some Web sites of particular structures. The criteria of the second class are concerned with the effort made by the user in the training process, so these criteria are capable of measuring the degree of automation for IE systems. The criteria of the third class are concerned with the techniques used in IE tasks, so these criteria are capable of measuring the performance of IE systems.

Enterprises are looking to find new and cost effective means to leverage existing investments in IT infrastructure and incorporate new capabilities in order to improve business productivity. As a means to improve the integration of applications hosted both internal and external to the enterprise, enterprises are turning to Service Oriented Architectures.In this paper, we describe some of the major aspects associated with the introduction of a Service Oriented Architecture and the impact that it can have on an enterprise's information architecture. We outline the concept of exposing data sources as services and discuss the critical integration aspects that need to be addressed including data access, data transformation, and integration into an over arching enterprise security scheme. The paper suggests alternatives, utilizing a Service Oriented Architecture approach, to promote flexible, extensible, and evolvable information architectures.

This paper presents a complete error analysis for a novel square root hardware implementation. The analysis includes the powering method used for the initial approximation and the higher order Newton-Raphson square root iterations. Both theoretical and algorithmic error analysis are presented and compared. The algorithmic analysis provides a more accurate error estimate which reduces the size of the memory required in the initial approximation stage to less than half its original size.