WEDAGEN-a synthetic Web database generator

At the Centre for Advanced Information Systems (CAIS), a Web warehousing system is being developed to store and manipulate Web information. The system named WHOWEDA (WareHouse Of WEb DAta) stores extracted Web information as Web tables and provides several Web operators, eg. Web join, Web select, global coupling, etc., to manipulate Web tables. During the implementation of WHOWEDA, it is necessary to perform systematic testing on the system and to evaluate its system performance. While it is possible for WHOWEDA to be tested or evaluated using actual Web pages downloaded from WWW, the amount of time required for such testing and evaluation would be so high that a comprehensive experimentation would not be possible. To overcome these difficulties, we have proposed to develop a synthetic Web database generator called WEDAGEN to efficiently generate synthetic Web information for performance evaluation and testing purposes. We present the major objectives to be accomplished by the proposed synthetic Web database generator.