7. The information platform of claim 4, wherein said parsing engine parses one contiguous span of information in a source document that is identified by specifying beginning and ending elements, wherein said specified elements can be defined using any coordinate specification techniques.
8. The information platform of claim 7, wherein said parsing engine further comprises: a parsing subsystem is implemented as an object with interfaces that support any of the following operations: Set source stream; Set/get operation bounds (passing begin and ending element coordinates or ids); Get source stream in specific format (pass desired format type); Get document tree structure (passing handle to a window tree control); Get element stream (passing element coordinates, or ID); Get element ID (passing element coordinates); Get element count (passing element type); Get first element stream (passing pattern based element coordinates, optional element type); Get next element stream; Get last element stream; Get table size (passing element coordinates or ID; and Get header coordinates (passing table coordinates/ID plus col/row of header).