Patent ID: 8166054

Claim:
A system for adaptively locating dynamic web page elements, said system comprising: a computer processor; an Extensible Markup Language Path Language (XPath) refiner for refining by the computer processor an XPath path expression of the web page element based on a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) knowledge database describing an HTML tag relationship and an attribute importance; and an enhanced XPath resolving engine for searching by the computer processor an HTML Document Object Model (DOM) tree of a target web page for the web page element through the refined XPath path expression; wherein the HTML knowledge database further comprises an HTML tag relationship table and an HTML attribute importance table, wherein the HTML tag relationship table is configured for representing said relationships between HTML tags, and wherein the HTML attribute importance table is configured for representing said importance of HTML attributes relative to HTML tags; wherein the relationships between HTML tags and the importance of HTML attributes relative to HTML tags are represented by weight values; wherein the enhanced XPath resolving engine is configured to output a result set when elements are found in the HTML DOM tree according to the XPath path expression; and when no element is found, to notify the XPath refiner to further refine the XPath path expression; wherein the XPath refiner is further configured to remove tags whose relationships do not achieve a threshold based on the HTML knowledge database from the XPath path expression; wherein the XPath refiner is further configured to adjust the threshold when no element is found by the enhanced XPath resolving engine.