Mobile Website Creation based on Web Data eXtraction and Reuse

抄録

Due to the rapid growth of mobile devices, using mobile devices to access the Internet is more and more popular. However, many websites are designed for desktop browsing and do not have Responsive Web Design (RWD) for mobile devices. Lacking mobile version for websites make it difficult for users to operate on mobile devices and may decrease the exposure rate or lose some commercial possibilities. However, abandon existing websites to create an RWD website (such as Wix) is not always a good idea since many services (e.g. backend management functions) need to be operated in a desktop GUI. In this paper we introduce a project called DeXaR (Data eXtraction and Reuse) to enable users to quickly and easily create an RWD website from existing website without programming. By incorporating automatic Web data extraction techniques to support Web Data ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) services, we are able to link contents of an existing website to the new website. In other words, we can keep mobile website synchronized with the existing website via data APIs such that users only need to maintain one copy of the data but it can be reused in mobile webpages. The user study on 35 students shows the design philosophy for mobile website creation from existing website is encouraging. However, further survey on the linkage of web data extraction needs to be explored.