Is Web Scraping Relevant in Today's Business World?

Different techniques and processes have been created and developed over time to collect and analyze data. Web scraping is one of the processes that have hit the business market recently. It is a great process that offers businesses with vast amounts of data from different sources such as websites and databases.

It is good to clear the air and let people know that data scraping is legal process. The main reason is in this case is because the information or data is already available in the internet. It is important to know that it is not a process of stealing information but rather a process of collecting reliable information. Most people have regarded the technique as unsavory behavior. Their main basis of argument is that with time the process will be over flooded and therefore lead to parity in plagiarism.

We can therefore simply define web scraping as a process of collecting data from a wide variety of different websites and databases. The process can be achieved either manually or by the use of software. The rise of data mining companies has led to more use of the web extraction and web crawling process. Other main functions such companies are to process and analyze the data harvested. One of the important aspects about these companies is that they employ experts. The experts are aware of the viable keywords and also the kind of information which can create usable statistic and also the pages that are worth the effort. Therefore the role of data mining companies is not limited to mining of data but also help their clients be able to identify the various relationships and also build the models.

Some of the common methods of web scraping used include web crawling, text gripping, DOM parsing, and expression matching. The latter process can only be achieved through parsers, HTML pages or even semantic annotation. Therefore there are many different ways of scraping the data but most importantly they work towards the same goal. The main objective of using web scraping service is to retrieve and also compile data contained in databases and websites. This is a must process for a business to remain relevant in the business world.

The main questions asked about web scraping touch on relevance. Is the process relevant in the business world? The answer to this question is yes. The fact that it is employed by large companies in the world and has derived many rewards says it all. It is important to note that many people regarded this technology as a plagiarism tool and others consider it as a useful tool that harvests the data required for the business success.

Using of web scraping process to extract data from the internet for competition analysis is highly recommended. If this is the case, then you must be sure to spot any pattern or trend that can work in a given market.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Is-Web-Scraping-Relevant-in-Todays-Business-World?&id=7091414

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679

A nice example of mediawiki – www.wikihow.com

wikiHow is a collaborative writing project aiming to build the world’s largest how-to manual. Our mission is to provide free and useful instructions to help people solve the problems of everyday life. As of this minute, wikiHow contains 10,603 articles. New articles are created every day and the existing articles are gradually improved by volunteer contributors. In time we envision this huge how to manual providing free, unbiased, accurate instructions on almost every topic imaginable. Please join us by contributing a new page or editing a page that someone else started.

Source: http://booleandreams.wordpress.com/2007/01/09/a-nice-example-of-mediawiki-wwwwikihowcom/

Unraveling data scraping: Understanding how to scrape data can facilitate journalists' work

Ever heard of "data scraping?" The term may seem new, but programmers have been using this technique for quite a while, and now it is attracting the attention of journalists who need to access and organize data for investigative reporting.

Scraping is a way of retrieving data from websites and placing it in a simple and flexible format so it can be cross-analyzed more easily. Many times the information necessary to support a story is available, however it is found in websites that are hard to navigate or in a data base that is hard to use. To automatically collect and display this information, reporters need to turn to computer programs known as "scrapers."

Even though it may seem like a "geek" thing, journalists don't need to take advanced courses in programming or know complicated language in order to scrape data. According to hacker Pedro Markun, who worked on several data scraping projects for the House of Digital Culture in Sao Paulo, the level of knowledge necessary to use this technique is "very basic."

“Scrapers are programs easy to handle. The big challenge and constant exercise is to find a pattern in the web pages' data - some pages are very simple, others are a never-ending headache," said Markun in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Markun has a public profile on the website Scraperwiki, that allows you to create your own data scraper online, or to access those written by others.

Like Scraperwiki, other online tools exist to facilitate data scraping, such as Mozenda, a simple interface software that automates most of the work, and Screen Scraper, a more complex tool that works with several programming languages to extract data from the Web. Another similar useful software is Firebug for Firefox.

Likewise, Google offers the the program Google Refine for manipulating confusing data and converting it into more manageable formats.

Journalists also can download for free Ruby, a simple and efficient programming language, that can be run on Nokogirito do scrapings on documents and websites.

Data is not always available in open formats or easy to scrape. Scanned documents, for example, need to be converted to virtual text. To do this, there is a function that can be found in Tesseract, an OCR (Optic Character Recognizer) tool of Google that "reads" scanned texts and converts them to virtual texts.

Information and guidelines about the use of these tools are available on websites such as Propublica, which offers several articles and tutorials on scraping tools for journalism. YouTube videos also can prove a helpful source.

Even if you have adopted the hacker philosophy, and reading tutorials or working hands-on tends to be your way of learning, you may encounter some doubts or difficulties when using these tools. If this is the case, a good option is to get in contact with more experienced programmers via discussion groups such as Thackday and Scraperwiki Community, which offer both free and paid-for alternatives to find someone to help do a scraping.

While navigating databases might be old school for some journalists, better understanding how to retrieve and organize data has gained in importance as we've entered an age of information overload, making taking advatage of such data-scraping tips all the more worthwhile.

Source: https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-9676-unraveling-data-scraping-understanding-how-scrape-data-can-facilitate-journalists-work