1Centre de recherche informatique de Montréal
550 Sherbrooke Street West,
Montréal, Canada H3A 1B9
hsnoussi@crim.ca
lmagnin@crim.ca
2Université de Montréal
C.P. 6128, succ. Centre-ville
Montreal, H3C 3J7 Canada
nie@iro.umontreal.ca
ABSTRACT
Multi-agent systems can be fully developed only
when they have access to a large number of
information sources. These latter are becoming more
and more available on the Internet in form of web
pages. This paper does not deal with the problem of
information retrieval, but rather the extraction of data
from HTML web pages in order to make them usable
by autonomous agents. This problem is not trivial
because of the heterogeneity of web pages. We
describe our approach to facilitate the formalization,
extraction and grouping of data from different sources.
To do this, we developed a utility tool that assists
us in generating a uniform description for each
information source, using descriptive domain
ontology. Users and agents can query the extracted
data using a standard querying interface. The ultimate
goal of this tool is to provide useful information to
autonomous agents.