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Languages for Web Data Extraction

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems
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Synonyms

Information extraction; Screen scraping; Web mining; Web scraping; Web site wrappers

Definition

Web data extraction is the process of automatically converting Web resources into a specific structured format. For example, if a collection of HTML web pages describes details about various companies (name, headquarters, etc) then web data extraction would involve converting this native HTML format into computer-processable data structures, such as entries in relational database tables. The purpose of web data extraction is to make web data available for subsequent manipulation or integration steps. In the previous example, the goal may be summarizing the results as some form of analytical report.

There are several approaches to Web data extraction. The most common approach is to specify the conversion process using a special-purpose programming Language for Web Data Extraction. Web data extraction then becomes a matter of executing a well-defined computer program.

Web data...

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Recommended Reading

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Correspondence to Nicholas Kushmerick .

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Kushmerick, N. (2017). Languages for Web Data Extraction. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1156-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1156-3

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Languages for Web Data Extraction
    Published:
    16 February 2017

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1156-3

  2. Original

    Languages for Web Data Extraction
    Published:
    29 November 2016

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1156-2