researching technologies for uni final year project

Im starting a programming project and i need some ideas/help to get me researching the technolgies which i might be using.

This is the project briefly....

Automatic Web Downloading

Manual browsing through an internet browser such as IE is very inefficent in extracting information . This project is to design a software agent that automatically extacts data from certain web pages. Data will be in a varity of formats including pdf/ps or even real time financial information etc

Languages to be used: Java must be used the rest is upto me.
I've done some basic java before what aspects of java ought I to be researching including any scripting languages ?
Would databases be useful?

would 'Professional Java Web Services' and 'Beginning Java Web services' by wrox ublishers be relevant.

I would appreciate any pointers however small

Thanks for your help

sounds like you want to write a bot. I don't really have experience w/ this, but there is source code you could review on this site
http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robot-code.html
These can get you started, though what you want sounds like a rather more complex program. You can write it in a variety of languages, including Java. You might want to check out javascript too. Databases might be helpful, I guess it depends how you would want your bot set up. I could see using a database to store different information the bot finds by category or keyword. I don't know about those books. If you are at a university, the library probably has a lot of up to date programming books to help as you sort out what you want to do, I'd check there before buying anything.
HTH

thanks karsh44