SmartWrap
Steven Gardiner, Anthony Tomasic, John L Zimmerman · 2015
The web contains many datasets presented visually, whose lack of semantic markup renders them difficult to understand and navigate using a screen reader. In this work, we explore the possibility of understanding the semantics of web datasets by asking sighted web users to manually scrape web pages into spreadsheets. Web users constitute a huge population of potential workers, but most are not programmers and may have difficulty understanding and communicating the abstractions involved in labeling web datasets. We present the design of a tool we call SmartWrap that directs the manual scraping work of everyday end users, explicitly including nonprogrammers, towards the construction of reusable programs, called wrappers, that map the scraped website into a structured dataset. To engage with nontechnical end users, we designed the tool to use very simple interactions. We present a user study validating that users with a variety of technical backgrounds were able to use it to construct wrappers. We also validate the SmartWrap approach to acquiring wrappers for a large part of the web by evaluating wrappers contributed by MTurk users using the tool. From the MTurk work we derive estimates for the costs of eliciting wrappers from the crowdworkers for a large proportion of the sampled datasets, and an estimate of what proportion of web datasets can be wrapped by crowdworkers using the tool. We also report some evidence that web users will contribute dataset semantics to the system without pay, motivated either to improve web accessibility or to expedite their own scraping tasks.