Ariel intends to assist in extracting information from semi-structured documents including (but not in any way limited to) web pages. Although you may use libraries such as Hpricot or Rubyful Soup, or even plain Regular Expressions to achieve the same goal, Ariel approaches the problem very differently. Ariel relies on the user labeling examples of the data they want to extract, and then finds patterns across several such labeled examples in order to produce a set of general rules for extracting this information from any similar document.
