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Screen Scraper

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Data extraction; Screen scraping; Screen wrapper

Definition

A screen scraper is a program which extracts relevant data from the visual user interface of an application. Input data are commonly represented using text-only or graphically enhanced tables, lists, and forms, tailored to a human audience. Scraping is the task of collecting data from its presentation, not directly from its source for lack of access. The scraper output has a structured and machine-readable format, where extracted data are usually annotated with its semantics (metadata), suitable for automatic post-processing. The process can be thought of as reverse-engineering a data store from its presentation, abstracting content from layout. Using this approach, application data are taken from the human-oriented screen output rather than the application’s hidden proprietary data structures.

Key Points

Traditionally, screen scrapers have been used to interface legacy systems residing on old mainframes, which often...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Hassan T, Baumgartner R. Intelligent text extraction from PDF documents. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Agents, Web Technologies and Internet Commerce; 2005. p. 2–6.

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  2. Huynh D, Mazzocchi S, Karger D. Piggy bank: experience the semantic web inside your web browser. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Semantic Web Conference; 2005.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Harald Naumann

Authors
  1. Harald Naumann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Harald Naumann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Computing Lab., Oxford Univ., Oxford, UK

    Georg Gottlob

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© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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Cite this entry

Naumann, H. (2018). Screen Scraper. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1167

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