- Student: Anthony L. Borchers, now at Lexmark International
- Purpose: Apply data extraction techniques to World Wide Web documents
- Method: A general-purpose WWW robot engine with an extension mechanism for attaching data-extraction
procedures at runtime. These procedures may then implement domain- or format-specific functionality.
- What the student learned
- Managing a large software project over a long period of time
- Multithreaded programming in Java, including synchronization methods (This part took considerable cleverness.)
- Details of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) spoken by Web servers and clients
- Technical writing skills in preparing the write up and packaging the resulting tools