Monday 30 September 2013

Web Scraper Shortcode WordPress Plugin Review

This short post is on the WP-plugin called Web Scraper Shortcode, that enables one to retrieve a portion of a web page or a whole page and insert it directly into a post. This plugin might be used for getting fresh data or images from web pages for your WordPress driven page without even visiting it. More scraping plugins and sowtware you can find in here.

To install it in WordPress go to Plugins -> Add New.
Usage

The plugin scrapes the page content and applies parameters to this scraped page if specified. To use the plugin just insert the

[web-scraper ]

shortcode into the HTML view of the WordPress page where you want to display the excerpts of a page or the whole page. The parameters are as follows:

    url (self explanatory)
    element – the dom navigation element notation, similar to XPath.
    limit – the maximum number of elements to be scraped and inserted if the element notation points to several of them (like elements of the same class).

The use of the plugin is of the dom (Data Object Model) notation, where consecutive dom nodes are stated like node1.node2; for example: element = ‘div.img’. The specific element scrape goes thru ‘#notation’. Example: if you want to scrape several ‘div’ elements of the class ‘red’ (<div class=’red’>…<div>), you need to specify the element attribute this way: element = ‘div#red’.
How to find DOM notation?

But for inexperienced users, how is it possible to find the dom notation of the desired element(s) from the web page? Web Developer Tools are a handy means for this. I would refer you to this paragraph on how to invoke Web Developer Tools in the browser (Google Chrome) and select a single page element to inspect it. As you select it with the ‘loupe’ tool, on the bottom line you’ll see the blue box with the element’s dom notation:


The plugin content

As one who works with web scraping, I was curious about  the means that the plugin uses for scraping. As I looked at the plugin code, it turned out that the plugin acquires a web page through ‘simple_html_dom‘ class:

    require_once(‘simple_html_dom.php’);
    $html = file_get_html($url);
    then the code performs iterations over the designated elements with the set limit

Pitfalls

    Be careful if you put two or more [web-scraper] shortcodes on your website, since downloading other pages will drastically slow the page load speed. Even if you want only a small element, the PHP engine first loads the whole page and then iterates over its elements.
    You need to remember that many pictures on the web are indicated by shortened URLs. So when such an image gets extracted it might be visible to you in this way: , since the URL is shortened and the plugin does not take note of  its base URL.
    The error “Fatal error: Call to a member function find() on a non-object …” will occur if you put this shortcode in a text-overloaded post.

Summary

I’d recommend using this plugin for short posts to be added with other posts’ elements. The use of this plugin is limited though.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/web-scraper-shortcode-wordpress-plugin-review/

Sunday 29 September 2013

Microsys A1 Website Scraper Review

The A1 scraper by Microsys is a program that is mainly used to scrape websites to extract data in large quantities for later use in webservices. The scraper works to extract text, URLs etc., using multiple Regexes and saving the output into a CSV file. This tool is can be compared with other web harvesting and web scraping services.
How it works
This scraper program works as follows:
Scan mode

    Go to the ScanWebsite tab and enter the site’s URL into the Path subtab.
    Press the ‘Start scan‘ button to cause the crawler to find text, links and other data on this website and cache them.

Important: URLs that you scrape data from have to pass filters defined in both analysis filters and output filters. The defining of those filters can be set at the Analysis filters and Output filters subtabs respectively. They must be set at the website analysis stage (mode).
Extract mode

    Go to the Scraper Options tab
    Enter the Regex(es) into the Regex input area.
    Define the name and path of the output CSV file.
    The scraper automatically finds and extracts the data according to Regex patterns.

The result will be stored in one CSV file for all the given URLs.

There is a need to mention that the set of regular expressions will be run against all the pages scraped.
Some more scraper features

Using the scraper as a website crawler also affords:

    URL filtering.
    Adjustment of the speed of crawling according to service needs rather than server load.

If  you need to extract data from a complex website, just disable Easy mode: out press the  button. A1 Scraper’s full tutorial is available here.
Conclusion

The A1 Scraper is good for mass gathering of URLs, text, etc., with multiple conditions set. However this scraping tool is designed for using only Regex expressions, which can increase the parsing process time greatly.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/microsys-a1-website-scraper-review/

Friday 27 September 2013

Visual Web Ripper: Using External Input Data Sources

Sometimes it is necessary to use external data sources to provide parameters for the scraping process. For example, you have a database with a bunch of ASINs and you need to scrape all product information for each one of them. As far as Visual Web Ripper is concerned, an input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values.

An input data source is normally used in one of these scenarios:

    To provide a list of input values for a web form
    To provide a list of start URLs
    To provide input values for Fixed Value elements
    To provide input values for scripts

Visual Web Ripper supports the following input data sources:

    SQL Server Database
    MySQL Database
    OleDB Database
    CSV File
    Script (A script can be used to provide data from almost any data source)

To see it in action you can download a sample project that uses an input CSV file with Amazon ASIN codes to generate Amazon start URLs and extract some product data. Place both the project file and the input CSV file in the default Visual Web Ripper project folder (My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects).

For further information please look at the manual topic, explaining how to use an input data source to generate start URLs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/visual-web-ripper-using-external-input-data-sources/

Thursday 26 September 2013

Using External Input Data in Off-the-shelf Web Scrapers

There is a question I’ve wanted to shed some light upon for a long time already: “What if I need to scrape several URL’s based on data in some external database?“.

For example, recently one of our visitors asked a very good question (thanks, Ed):

    “I have a large list of amazon.com asin. I would like to scrape 10 or so fields for each asin. Is there any web scraping software available that can read each asin from a database and form the destination url to be scraped like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{asin} and scrape the data?”

This question impelled me to investigate this matter. I contacted several web scraper developers, and they kindly provided me with detailed answers that allowed me to bring the following summary to your attention:
Visual Web Ripper

An input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values. You can find the additional information here.
Web Content Extractor

You can use the -at”filename” command line option to add new URLs from TXT or CSV file:

    WCExtractor.exe projectfile -at”filename” -s

projectfile: the file name of the project (*.wcepr) to open.
filename – the file name of the CSV or TXT file that contains URLs separated by newlines.
-s – starts the extraction process

You can find some options and examples here.
Mozenda

Since Mozenda is cloud-based, the external data needs to be loaded up into the user’s Mozenda account. That data can then be easily used as part of the data extracting process. You can construct URLs, search for strings that match your inputs, or carry through several data fields from an input collection and add data to it as part of your output. The easiest way to get input data from an external source is to use the API to populate data into a Mozenda collection (in the user’s account). You can also input data in the Mozenda web console by importing a .csv file or importing one through our agent building tool.

Once the data is loaded into the cloud, you simply initiate building a Mozenda web agent and refer to that Data list. By using the Load page action and the variable from the inputs, you can construct a URL like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%asin%.
Helium Scraper

Here is a video showing how to do this with Helium Scraper:

The video shows how to use the input data as URLs and as search terms. There are many other ways you could use this data, way too many to fit in a video. Also, if you know SQL, you could run a query to get the data directly from an external MS Access database like
SELECT * FROM [MyTable] IN "C:\MyDatabase.mdb"

Note that the database needs to be a “.mdb” file.
WebSundew Data Extractor
Basically this allows using input data from external data sources. This may be CSV, Excel file or a Database (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Here you can see how to do this in the case of an external file, but you can do it with a database in a similar way (you just need to write an SQL script that returns the necessary data).
In addition to passing URLs from the external sources you can pass other input parameters as well (input fields, for example).
Screen Scraper

Screen Scraper is really designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases. We have composed a separate article where you can find a tutorial and a sample project about scraping Amazon products based on a list of their ASINs.

Source: http://extract-web-data.com/using-external-input-data-in-off-the-shelf-web-scrapers/

Wednesday 25 September 2013

A simple way to turn a website into JSON

Recently, while surfing the web I stumbled upon an simple web scraping service named Web Scrape Master. It is a kind of RESTful web service that extracts data from a specified web site and returns it to you in JSON format.
How it works

Though I don’t know what this service may be useful for, I still like its simplicity: all you need to do is to make an HTTP GET request, passing all necessary parameters in the query string:
http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url={url}&xpath={xpath}&attr={attr}&callback={callback}

    url  - the URL of the website you want to scrape
    xpath – xpath determining the data you need to extract
    attr - attribute the name you need to get the value of (optional)
    callback - JSON callback function (optional)

For example, for the following request to our testing ground:

http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url=http://testing-ground.extract-web-data.com/blocks&xpath=//div[@id=case1]/div[1]/span[1]/div

You will get the following response:

[{"text":"<div class='name'>Dell Latitude D610-1.73 Laptop Wireless Computer</div>","attrs":{"class":"name"}}]
Visual Web Scraper

Also, this service offers a special visual tool for building such requests. All you need to do is to enter the URL of the website and click to the element you need to scrape:
Visual Web Scraper
Conclusion

Though I understand that the developer of this service is attempting to create a simple web scraping service, it is still hard to imagine where it can be useful. The task that the service does can be easily accomplished by means of any language.

Probably if you already have software receiving JSON from the web, and you want to feed it with data from some website, then you may find this service useful. The other possible application is to hide your IP when you do web scraping. If you have other ideas, it would be great if you shared them with us.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/a-simple-way-to-turn-a-website-into-json/

Tuesday 24 September 2013

Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.



A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

Monday 23 September 2013

Elevate Your Business With Data Entry Services

The sole aim of many organizations is to progress well in their objectives and hire people who are good and efficient in their work. However, sometimes, there are some work profiles that are mundane in nature but equally important like data entry services. You will be amazed to know that these services also play a crucial role in building the future of an organization.

In fact, with the coming of information technology, the data entry services have actually become a kind of industry, as various businesses need accurate and detailed information for various reasons. Thus they are relying on such services that not only help them in growing but are cost effective too. These data entry services are an asset for any organization irrespective of its size in both the terms of workforce, financial status and area. With the help of such services you are able to get the information on the market trends, your clients and moreover, about the status of your own business. Hence, there is a lot of demand for data entry services in order to do great business.

As you must be aware of the fact that data entry services can be time consuming; hence it requires efficient workforce to execute various tasks perfectly and diligently. Every transaction has to be recorded, processed and analyzed so that the management or the decision-makers can have a clear picture of the actual financial standing of the company. In fact, there are many organizations that are interested in the data of company so that they can strike a business deal with the company in the future; the competitors are also the one's who are constantly following the happenings of the company. However, the most important part that constitutes group are the shareholders, employees, creditors, consumers and the market in general. Therefore, this service plays a significant role in determining the future of the company. Thus, it is taken very seriously by many business enterprises for various reasons that can elevate their businesses by many fractions.

In fact, data entry services are now being outsourced from various leading vendors to further simplify the requirements of every business. Well, these services cover many business activities like document and image processing, data conversion, image enhancement, image editing, catalog processing, and photo manipulation. In fact, you can use data entry services for transferring hard or soft copy to any database format; insurance claims entry; PDF document indexing; online data capture; product catalogs to web based systems; online order entry and follow up; creation of new databases. Moreover, banks, airlines, government agencies, direct marketing services and service providers are using these services for better businesses.

The data services are also utilized for mailing lists; data mining and warehousing; data cleansing; audio transcriptions; legal documents; indexing of vouchers and documents; hand written ballot or card entry; online completion of surveys and responses of customers for various companies. Now its up to the company to whether go for a vendor or hire in-house staff to accomplish tasks in a better way; the main purpose of this service is to offer convenience that can help in curbing time as well as other resources.





Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Elevate-Your-Business-With-Data-Entry-Services&id=777230

Sunday 22 September 2013

Know What the Truth Behind Data Mining Outsourcing Service

We came to that, what we call the information age where industries are like useful data needed for decision-making, the creation of products - among other essential uses for business. Information mining and converting them to useful information is a part of this trend that allows companies to reach their optimum potential. However, many companies that do not meet even one deal with data mining question because they are simply overwhelmed with other important tasks. This is where data mining outsourcing comes in.

There have been many definitions to introduced, but it can be simply explained as a process that involves sorting through large amounts of raw data to extract valuable information needed by industries and enterprises in various fields. In most cases this is done by professionals, professional organizations and financial analysts. He has seen considerable growth in the number of sectors or groups that enter my self.
There are a number of reasons why there is a rapid growth in data mining outsourcing service subscriptions. Some of them are presented below:

A wide range of services

Many companies are turning to information mining outsourcing, because they cover a wide range of services. These services include, but are not limited to data from web applications congregation database, collect contact information from different sites, extract data from websites using the software, the sort of stories from sources news, information and accumulate commercial competitors.

Many companies fall

Many industries benefit because it is fast and realistic. The information extracted by data mining service providers of outsourcing used in crucial decisions in the field of direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, health, scientific tests and other experimental work, telecommunications, financial services, and a whole lot more.

A lot of advantages

Subscribe data mining outsourcing services it's offers many benefits, as providers assures customers to render services to world standards. They strive to work with improved technologies, scalability, sophisticated infrastructure, resources, timeliness, cost, the system safer for the security of information and increased market coverage.

Outsourcing allows companies to focus their core business and can improve overall productivity. Not surprisingly, information mining outsourcing has been a first choice of many companies - to propel the business to higher profits.

In this Article Author wants to tell about Data mining services and truth behind Data Mining Outsourcing Service.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Know-What-the-Truth-Behind-Data-Mining-Outsourcing-Service&id=5303589

Friday 20 September 2013

Data Mining vs Screen-Scraping

Data mining isn't screen-scraping. I know that some people in the room may disagree with that statement, but they're actually two almost completely different concepts.

In a nutshell, you might state it this way: screen-scraping allows you to get information, where data mining allows you to analyze information. That's a pretty big simplification, so I'll elaborate a bit.

The term "screen-scraping" comes from the old mainframe terminal days where people worked on computers with green and black screens containing only text. Screen-scraping was used to extract characters from the screens so that they could be analyzed. Fast-forwarding to the web world of today, screen-scraping now most commonly refers to extracting information from web sites. That is, computer programs can "crawl" or "spider" through web sites, pulling out data. People often do this to build things like comparison shopping engines, archive web pages, or simply download text to a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered and analyzed.

Data mining, on the other hand, is defined by Wikipedia as the "practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns." In other words, you already have the data, and you're now analyzing it to learn useful things about it. Data mining often involves lots of complex algorithms based on statistical methods. It has nothing to do with how you got the data in the first place. In data mining you only care about analyzing what's already there.

The difficulty is that people who don't know the term "screen-scraping" will try Googling for anything that resembles it. We include a number of these terms on our web site to help such folks; for example, we created pages entitled Text Data Mining, Automated Data Collection, Web Site Data Extraction, and even Web Site Ripper (I suppose "scraping" is sort of like "ripping"). So it presents a bit of a problem-we don't necessarily want to perpetuate a misconception (i.e., screen-scraping = data mining), but we also have to use terminology that people will actually use.

Todd Wilson is the owner of screen-scraper.com (http://www.screen-scraper.com/), a company which specializes in data extraction from web pages. While not scraping screens Todd is hard at work finishing up a doctoral degree in Instructional Psychology and Technology.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-vs-Screen-Scraping&id=146813

Thursday 19 September 2013

Importance of Data Mining Services in Business

Data mining is used in re-establishment of hidden information of the data of the algorithms. It helps to extract the useful information starting from the data, which can be useful to make practical interpretations for the decision making.
It can be technically defined as automated extraction of hidden information of great databases for the predictive analysis. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of data, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making. Although data mining is a relatively new term, the technology is not. It is thus also known as Knowledge discovery in databases since it grip searching for implied information in large databases.
It is primarily used today by companies with a strong customer focus - retail, financial, communication and marketing organizations. It is having lot of importance because of its huge applicability. It is being used increasingly in business applications for understanding and then predicting valuable data, like consumer buying actions and buying tendency, profiles of customers, industry analysis, etc. It is used in several applications like market research, consumer behavior, direct marketing, bioinformatics, genetics, text analysis, e-commerce, customer relationship management and financial services.

However, the use of some advanced technologies makes it a decision making tool as well. It is used in market research, industry research and for competitor analysis. It has applications in major industries like direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, scientific tests, genetics, financial services and utilities.

Data mining consists of major elements:

    Extract and load operation data onto the data store system.
    Store and manage the data in a multidimensional database system.
    Provide data access to business analysts and information technology professionals.
    Analyze the data by application software.
    Present the data in a useful format, such as a graph or table.

The use of data mining in business makes the data more related in application. There are several kinds of data mining: text mining, web mining, relational databases, graphic data mining, audio mining and video mining, which are all used in business intelligence applications. Data mining software is used to analyze consumer data and trends in banking as well as many other industries.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Importance-of-Data-Mining-Services-in-Business&id=2601221

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Why Outsource Data Entry Services?

All large business and organizations are faced with the task of processing huge amounts of data on a daily basis. The data to be processed may range from indexing of vouchers and documents to collecting of information from customers and vendors. In order to save on the huge amount of time, energy and monetary resources which go into data entry, businesses world wide have discovered the multiple benefits of outsourcing their Data Entry Services to India. Along with quick turn around time, reliability of data accuracy and confidentiality of all client databases, outsourcing Data Entry Services to India also proves to be extremely cost-effective.

What are the kinds of Services that can be outsourced?

Most outsourcing companies provide custom made Data-Entry Services depending on the client's specifications. A few of them provided by Indian Outsourcing Companies are;

- Data entry from product catalogs to web based systems
- Entry from hard/soft copy to any preferred database format
- Insurance claims processing
- Image Entry
- Data mining and warehousing
- Data cleansing
- Entry from hospital records, patient notes and accident reports
- From e-book and e-magazine publications on the Internet
- Entry for mailing lists
- PDF document indexing
- Online data capture services
- Online order entry and follow up services
- Creating new databases and updating of existing databases for banks, airlines, government agencies
- direct marketing services and service providers
- Web based indexed document retrieval services, tools and support
- Entry of legal documents
- Indexing of vouchers and documents
- Hand written ballot/cards entry
- Online completion of surveys and responses of customers for various companies
- Business card indexing
- Custom data export/import interfaces with audits
- Bonded mail handling cash, credit and check processing
- Entry of Questionnaires
- Entry of Company Reports
- From Printed / Handwritten Source
- From Yellow Pages / White Pages
- Entry of Dictionaries, Manuals and Encyclopedia
- Entry of Surveys

What is the process?

Since most Indian companies hire only competent and highly qualified staff, outsourcing Data Entry Services to India ensures that the client is fully satisfied with the end result. Added to this the client's data confidentiality and security is viewed as extremely important. Each project goes through a specific data entry service plan that aims to fulfill the exact need of the customer and the error rate is always kept below 2-3%. The process is as follows:

- Data is processed, scanned and uploaded on to secure FTP online server
- Data is subsequently accessed over VPN and downloaded
- Data is individually indexed and sorted into private work folders
- Data is entered into specific applications as per client's requirements
- Data is checked and assessed for errors
- Data is finally sent to the customers

What are the benefits of outsourcing Services?

Oversees companies outsourcing their Data Entry Services to India have the assurance that their projects will be delivered on time with the highest levels of data quality and accuracy. The cost competitive prices, highly qualified employees, fast turnaround time and data security offered by outsourcing vendors, make sure that all of the client's objectives and goals are met. Outsourcing of these Services to India has been proven to be an advantageous choice for businesses worldwide.

Outsource2india provides Outsourcing Services and Solutions, Data Entry Services data processing services, data management, Business and Knowledge Process Outsourcing, Call Center Services, Healthcare Services, Engineering Services, Software Services, Digital Image Editing Services, Research & Analysis Services, Creative Services, Web Analytics Services, etc.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-Outsource-Data-Entry-Services?&id=1428867

Tuesday 17 September 2013

Data Mining

Data Mining is defined as the extraction of required information or knowledge from large databases. This is a powerful new technology with great potential to help companies focus on the most important information in their data warehouses. The tools related to this new technology predict future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. The automated, prospective analysis offered by data mining move beyond the analysis of past events provided by retrospective tools typical of decision support systems. Data mining tools can answer business questions that traditionally were too time consuming to resolve. This new technology takes the process of knowledge and information acquisition beyond retrospective data access and navigation to prospective and proactive information delivery.

The Technology derives its name from the similarities between searching for valuable business information in a large database and mining a mountain for a vein of valuable ore. Both processes require either sifting through an immense amount of material, or intelligently probing it to find exactly where the value resides. Data mining automates the process of finding predictive information in large databases. Data mining tools sweep through databases and identify previously hidden patterns in one step. Data mining techniques can yield the benefits of automation on existing software and hardware platforms, and can be implemented on new systems as existing platforms are upgraded and new products developed.. Powerful systems for collecting data and managing it in large databases are in place in all large and mid-range companies.

Data Mining is predicted to be amongst the top five technologies of the world that are poised for fantastic growth and development in the next five years. Data Mining today assumes importance and significance because of the increasing thrust on knowledge and information which is an essential factor in successfully running ebusiness. Data Mining cannot replace completely human analysis and interaction. But it can greatly assist human intellect to take well thought out decisions through fast computing capabilities and through pinpointing thrust areas of the concerned business.

Data Mining is considered as the new thrust area technology, the blue-eyed boy of the ebusiness world, with great scope for expansion beyond the present day horizons of the e enterprises. Data is vital to the growth of ebusiness. And getting the right data at the right time is the crux of good business sense. Growth of web enterprises is dependent solely on knowledge and information processing. Data Mining therefore has arrived on the scene at the very appropriate time , helping these enterprises to achieve a number of complex tasks that would have taken up ages but for the advent of this marvelous new technology.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining&id=1217896

Monday 16 September 2013

Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:
• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection
Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:
• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.

Should you have any queries regarding Web Data extraction services, please feel free to contact us. We would strive to answer each of your queries in detail. Email us at info@outsourcingwebresearch.com

Richard Kaith is member of Web data extraction team at Outsourcing Web Research firm - an established BPO company offering effective Web Data mining, Data extraction and Web research services at affordable rates. For any queries visit us at http://www.outsourcingwebresearch.com




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services-and-Data-Collection-Form-Website-Pages&id=4860417

Sunday 15 September 2013

Data Recovery Services - When You're Facing A Wipeout

Your computer files are the foundation of your business. What if one day you awaken to find that your computer has crashed, and the foundation of you business appears to have crumbled? Are those files nothing but dust on the winds of cyberspace? Or is there a way to gather up their bits and bytes, reassemble them, and lay the bricks of a new foundation?

There very well may be, but it requires the skilled handling of one of the many data recovery services which have come to the rescue of more computer-driven businesses than you might believe. And they have not retrieved data only for small business proprietors; data recovery services have been the saving of many a multi-million dollar operation or project. Data recovery services have also practiced good citizenship in recovering data erased from the hard drives of undesirables.

Finding Data Recovery Services

If you're someone who neglected, or never learned how, to back up your hard drive, it's time to call for help from one of the data recover service by doing an online search and finding one, if possible, nearby. If you have to settle for one of the data recovery services I another area, so be it. You're not in a position to quibble, are you?

You'll need to extract your non-functioning hard drive from your PC and send it out to have data recovery services administered. Whichever of the data recovery services company you have chosen will examine you hard drive's memory to determine how much of the data on it can be restored, and give you an estimate of the job's cost.

Only you are the expert on the importance of that data to your future, and only you can decide whether or not the price quoted by the data recovery services company is acceptable. If you think you can find a way to work around the lost data, simply tell the data recovery services company to return your hard drive.

What You'll Get For Your Money

But before you do that, consider exactly what the data recovery services will entail, and why they are not cheap. Your mangled hard drive will be taken to a clean room absolutely free of dust, and operated on with tools of surgical precision so that even the tiniest bits of functional data can be retrieved.

If their price still seems too high, ask the data recovery services company what their policy is if they find that they are unable to retrieve a meaningful amount of data. Many of them will not charge you if they cannot help your situation.

Data recovery services companies offer high-tech, high-cost solutions, but you won't find anyone else who can do what they do. So next time, backup your hard drive, but if your future is really at stake, then data recovery services are the best chance you have of getting it back.

You can also find more info on Data Recovery Program and Data Recovery Service Pcdatarecoveryhelp.com is a comprehensive resource to know about Data Recovery.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Recovery-Services---When-Youre-Facing-A-Wipeout&id=615548

Friday 13 September 2013

Has It Been Done Before? Optimize Your Patent Search Using Patent Scraping Technology

Has it been done before? Optimize your Patent Search using Patent Scraping Technology.

Since the US patent office opened in 1790, inventors across the United States have been submitting all sorts of great products and half-baked ideas to their database. Nowadays, many individuals get ideas for great products only to have the patent office do a patent search and tell them that their ideas have already been patented by someone else! Herin lies a question: How do I perform a patent search to find out if my invention has already been patented before I invest time and money into developing it?

The US patent office patent search database is available to anyone with internet access.

US Patent Search Homepage

Performing a patent search with the patent searching tools on the US Patent office webpage can prove to be a very time consuming process. For example, patent searching the database for "dog" and "food" yields 5745 patent search results. The straight-forward approach to investigating the patent search results for your particular idea is to go through all 5745 results one at a time looking for yours. Get some munchies and settle in, this could take a while! The patent search database sorts results by patent number instead of relevancy. This means that if your idea was recently patented, you will find it near the top but if it wasn't, you could be searching for quite a while. Also, most patent search results have images associated with them. Downloading and displaying these images over the internet can be very time consuming depending on you internet connection and the availability of the patent search database servers.

Because patent searches take such a long time, many companies and organizations are looking ways to improve the process. Some organizations and companies will hire employees for the sole purpose of performing patent searches for them. Others contract out the job to small business that specialize in patent searches. The latest technology for performing patent searches is called patent scraping.

Patent scraping is the process of writing computer automated scripts that analyze a website and copy only the content you are interested in into easily accessible databases or spreadsheets on your computer. Because it is a computerized script performing the patent search, you don't need a separate employee to get the data, you can let it run the patent scraping while you perform other important tasks! Patent scraping technology can also extract text content from images. By saving the images and textual content to your computer, you can then very efficiently search them for content and relevancy; thus saving you lots of time that could be better spent actually inventing something!

To put a real-world face on this, let us consider the pharmaceutical industry. Many different companies are competing for the patent on the next big drug. It has become an indispensible tactic of the industry for one company to perform patent searches for what patents the other companies are applying for, thus learning in which direction the research and development team of the other company is taking them. Using this information, the company can then choose to either pursue that direction heavily, or spin off in a different direction. It would quickly become very costly to maintain a team of researchers dedicated to only performing patent searches all day. Patent scraping technology is the means for figuring out what ideas and technologies are coming about before they make headline news. It is by utilizing patent scraping technology that the large companies stay up to date on the latest trends in technology.

While some companies choose to hire their own programming team to do their patent scraping scripts for them, it is much more cost effective to contract out the job to a qualified team of programmers dedicated to performing such services.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Has-It-Been-Done-Before?-Optimize-Your-Patent-Search-Using-Patent-Scraping-Technology&id=171000

Thursday 12 September 2013

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Data scrape is the process of extracting data from web by using software program from proven website only. Extracted data any one can use for any purposes as per the desires in various industries as the web having every important data of the world. We provide best of the web data extracting software. We have the expertise and one of kind knowledge in web data extraction, image scrapping, screen scrapping, email extract services, data mining, web grabbing.

Who can use Data Scraping Services?

Data scraping and extraction services can be used by any organization, company, or any firm who would like to have a data from particular industry, data of targeted customer, particular company, or anything which is available on net like data of email id, website name, search term or anything which is available on web. Most of time a marketing company like to use data scraping and data extraction services to do marketing for a particular product in certain industry and to reach the targeted customer for example if X company like to contact a restaurant of California city, so our software can extract the data of restaurant of California city and a marketing company can use this data to market their restaurant kind of product. MLM and Network marketing company also use data extraction and data scrapping services to to find a new customer by extracting data of certain prospective customer and can contact customer by telephone, sending a postcard, email marketing, and this way they build their huge network and build large group for their own product and company.

We helped many companies to find particular data as per their need for example.

Web Data Extraction

Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Because of this, tool kits that scrape web content were created. A web scraper is an API to extract data from a web site. We help you to create a kind of API which helps you to scrape data as per your need. We provide quality and affordable web Data Extraction application

Data Collection

Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using info structures suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. That's why the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user.

Email Extractor

A tool which helps you to extract the email ids from any reliable sources automatically that is called a email extractor. It basically services the function of collecting business contacts from various web pages, HTML files, text files or any other format without duplicates email ids.

Screen scrapping

Screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text information from a computer display terminal's screen and collecting visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping.

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services is the process of extracting patterns from information. Datamining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. Any format including MS excels, CSV, HTML and many such formats according to your requirements.

Web spider

A Web spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Web Grabber

Web grabber is just a other name of the data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot is software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. Web bot software is the best program to pull out articles, blog, relevant website content and many such website related data We have worked with many clients for data extracting, data scrapping and data mining they are really happy with our services we provide very quality services and make your work data work very easy and automatic.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Web-Data-Extraction-Services-Will-Save-Your-Time-and-Money-by-Automatic-Data-Collection&id=5159023

Wednesday 11 September 2013

About Outsourcing Data Entry Services

Data can be defined as numbers or characters that usually represent the dimensions or measurements. Data entry can be applied to any process that coverts data from one form to another. These services cover almost all business and professional services like data conversion, online and offline data entry, document and image processing; image entry, insurance claim entry, data processing, form processing, etc. Also collecting numerous data related to certain topics and then to present them in meaningful & easy to understand presentations.

Data entry services are very useful in business firms and organizations as there is a huge demand of entry work. These services are considered as the central part in any of the businesses. These services are useful to organize and manage your data/information in digital format. One of the types is data processing that generally programmed on a mainframe, minicomputer, microcomputer or personal computer. These systems are used for entry related work and to convert data into information.

About Data Entry Outsourcing
Outsourcing means to hire the services from a third party for your requirements. No sooner did outsourcing get support from the global technological development than business organizations started outsourcing entry. Data entry outsourcing is a simple contract between two different identities for any type of data entry service.

The main purpose for doing outsourcing is the availability of qualified and experienced computer operators at low cost. There are various types of entry operations such as data conversion, data processing, catalog processing services, image enhancement, image editing and photo manipulation services, etc, provided by BPO Services firms.

How helpful Services are?
o Data entry services help the companies for sharpening their foundation, analyzing their operations, strategies, policies, activities.

o Data processing services also encircle a variety of methods for how data is processed and to what extent the data is prepared to yield the best of the outcomes for the company.

o Data Conversion services help the business to convert information into easy format that is useful to increase online and offline popularity of business.

These all mechanisms help large as well as small business to enhance their internal process. These also help companies to increase their productivity and develop healthy external contacts.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?About-Outsourcing-Data-Entry-Services&id=2747714

Monday 9 September 2013

Basics of Online Web Research, Web Mining & Data Extraction Services

The evolution of the World Wide Web and Search engines has brought the abundant and ever growing pile of data and information on our finger tips. It has now become a popular and important resource for doing information research and analysis.

Today, Web research services are becoming more and more complicated. It involves various factors such as business intelligence and web interaction to deliver desired results.

Web Researchers can retrieve web data using search engines (keyword queries) or browsing specific web resources. However, these methods are not effective. Keyword search gives a large chunk of irrelevant data. Since each webpage contains several outbound links it is difficult to extract data by browsing too.

Web mining is classified into web content mining, web usage mining and web structure mining. Content mining focuses on the search and retrieval of information from web. Usage mining extract and analyzes user behavior. Structure mining deals with the structure of hyperlinks.

Web mining services can be divided into three subtasks:

Information Retrieval (IR): The purpose of this subtask is to automatically find all relevant information and filter out irrelevant ones. It uses various Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc and other resources to find the required information.

Generalization: The goal of this subtask is to explore users' interest using data extraction methods such as clustering and association rules. Since web data are dynamic and inaccurate, it is difficult to apply traditional data mining techniques directly on the raw data.

Data Validation (DV): It tries to uncover knowledge from the data provided by former tasks. Researcher can test various models, simulate them and finally validate given web information for consistency.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Basics-of-Online-Web-Research,-Web-Mining-and-Data-Extraction-Services&id=4511101

Sunday 8 September 2013

Outsource Your Work To Data Entry Services To Convert Your Paperwork To An Electronic Format

Among the many services that are outsourced, data entry services are much in demand. While the job profile might seem simple it does in fact require a certain degree of exactness and an eye for detail. Maintaining and handling the client confidentiality is also very important. Data needs to be processed and the first step is always entering the information in the system. An operator needs to be careful while entering information in the system as often this data is used to collate data and for statistical reports and is also the foundation for all the information on the company. These services include much more than just basic information in this technology driven age. An operator today has projects that require Image entry, card Entry, legal document's entry, medical claim entry, entry for online survey forms, online indexing, copying, pasting and sorting of data etc.

A Data entry operator is competent at handling online as well as offline data and even to excel. Specialized services like Image editing, image clipping and cropping services are also available with this service. BPO companies offer these services at very cost effective rates and the work is processed 24x7 ensuring that the work is constantly auctioned. Many data sensitive projects are also completed even in a 24 hour. There are many online services to choose from and each specializes in various features with ample industry experience. These services use the latest technology to ensure that paperwork is processed in the shorted possible time and is converted into electronic data that is easier to store.

A professional service must be able to offer the following features like data conversion and even storage, effective management of databases and an adherence to turnaround times, 100% accuracy of the data entered, 24x7 webs and phone support, a secure and accurate data capture, data extraction and data processing and importantly a cost effective solution for quality data services. A professional company will also ensure that there is a Quality Assurance department monitoring the quality of the work being handled with relevant feedback to both the client and to the operator.

Before deciding on outsourcing your work to a data entry service ensures that the company is known for its reliability and quality. A company that offers data backup is also a good option as it will take care of all the paperwork while forwarding the converted electronic data back. This paperwork could be extracted in the case of a claim or any legal requirement. There are many BPO companies online advertising their services, browse through their features and find one that suits your requirements.

The writer is a Data entry service provider who specializes as data entry operator. Inquire for a free quote for data entry services. If you want services as data entry operators or data entry for your organizations. We are able to provide data entry services at affordable low cost.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsource-Your-Work-To-Data-Entry-Services-To-Convert-Your-Paperwork-To-An-Electronic-Format&id=7270797

Friday 6 September 2013

Data Mining's Importance in Today's Corporate Industry

A large amount of information is collected normally in business, government departments and research & development organizations. They are typically stored in large information warehouses or bases. For data mining tasks suitable data has to be extracted, linked, cleaned and integrated with external sources. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of information, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making.

Data mining is the automated analysis of large information sets to find patterns and trends that might otherwise go undiscovered. It is largely used in several applications such as understanding consumer research marketing, product analysis, demand and supply analysis, telecommunications and so on. Data Mining is based on mathematical algorithm and analytical skills to drive the desired results from the huge database collection.

It can be technically defined as the automated mining of hidden information from large databases for predictive analysis. Web mining requires the use of mathematical algorithms and statistical techniques integrated with software tools.

Data mining includes a number of different technical approaches, such as:

    Clustering
    Data Summarization
    Learning Classification Rules
    Finding Dependency Networks
    Analyzing Changes
    Detecting Anomalies

The software enables users to analyze large databases to provide solutions to business decision problems. Data mining is a technology and not a business solution like statistics. Thus the data mining software provides an idea about the customers that would be intrigued by the new product.

It is available in various forms like text, web, audio & video data mining, pictorial data mining, relational databases, and social networks. Data mining is thus also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases since it involves searching for implicit information in large databases. The main kinds of data mining software are: clustering and segmentation software, statistical analysis software, text analysis, mining and information retrieval software and visualization software.

Data Mining therefore has arrived on the scene at the very appropriate time, helping these enterprises to achieve a number of complex tasks that would have taken up ages but for the advent of this marvelous new technology.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Minings-Importance-in-Todays-Corporate-Industry&id=2057401

Thursday 5 September 2013

Data Management Services

In recent studies it has been revealed that any business activity has astonishing huge volumes of data, hence the ideas has to be organized well and can be easily gotten when need arises. Timely and accurate solutions are important in facilitating efficiency in any business activity. With the emerging professional outsourcing and data organizing companies nowadays many services are offered that matches the various kinds of managing the data collected and various business activities. This article looks at some of the benefits that accrue of offered by the professional data mining companies.

Entering of data

These kinds of services are quite significant since they help in converting the data that is needed in high ideal and format that is digitized. In internet some of this data can found that is original and handwritten. In printed paper documents and or text are not likely to contain electronic or needed formats. The best example in this context is books that need to be converted to e-books. In insurance companies they also depend on this process in processing the claims of insurance and at the same time apply to the law firms that offer support to analyze and process legal documents.

EDC

That is referred to as electronic data. This method is mostly used by clinical researchers and other related organization in medical. The electronic data and capture methods are used in the utilization in managing trials and research. The data mining and data management services are given in upcoming databases for studies. The ideas contained can easily be captured, other services being done and the survey taken.

Data changing

This is the process of converting data found in one format to another. Data extraction process often involves mining data from an existing system, formatting it, cleansing it and can be installed to enhance both availability and retrieving of information easily. Extensive testing and application are the requirements of this process. The service offered by data mining companies includes SGML conversion, XML conversion, CAD conversion, HTML conversion, image conversion.

Managing data service

In this service it involves the conversion of documents. It is where one character of a text may need to be converted to another. If we take an example it is easy to change image, video or audio file formats to other applications of the software that can be played or displayed. In indexing and scanning is where the services are mostly offered.

Data extraction and cleansing

Significant information and sequences from huge databases and websites extraction firms use this kind of service. The data harvested is supposed to be in a productive way and should be cleansed to increase the quality. Both manual and automated data cleansing services are offered by data mining organizations. This helps to ensure that there is accuracy, completeness and integrity of data. Also we keep in mind that data mining is never enough.

Web scraping, data extraction services, web extraction, imaging, catalog conversion, web data mining and others are the other management services offered by data mining organization. If your business organization needs such services here is one that can be of great significance that is web scraping and data mining



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Management-Services&id=7131758

Wednesday 4 September 2013

An Easy Way For Data Extraction

There are so many data scraping tools are available in internet. With these tools you can you download large amount of data without any stress. From the past decade, the internet revolution has made the entire world as an information center. You can obtain any type of information from the internet. However, if you want any particular information on one task, you need search more websites. If you are interested in download all the information from the websites, you need to copy the information and pate in your documents. It seems a little bit hectic work for everyone. With these scraping tools, you can save your time, money and it reduces manual work.

The Web data extraction tool will extract the data from the HTML pages of the different websites and compares the data. Every day, there are so many websites are hosting in internet. It is not possible to see all the websites in a single day. With these data mining tool, you are able to view all the web pages in internet. If you are using a wide range of applications, these scraping tools are very much useful to you.

The data extraction software tool is used to compare the structured data in internet. There are so many search engines in internet will help you to find a website on a particular issue. The data in different sites is appears in different styles. This scraping expert will help you to compare the date in different site and structures the data for records.

And the web crawler software tool is used to index the web pages in the internet; it will move the data from internet to your hard disk. With this work, you can browse the internet much faster when connected. And the important use of this tool is if you are trying to download the data from internet in off peak hours. It will take a lot of time to download. However, with this tool you can download any data from internet at fast rate.There is another tool for business person is called email extractor. With this toll, you can easily target the customers email addresses. You can send advertisement for your product to the targeted customers at any time. This the best tool to find the database of the customers.

However, there are some more scraping tolls are available in internet. And also some of esteemed websites are providing the information about these tools. You download these tools by paying a nominal amount.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?An-Easy-Way-For-Data-Extraction&id=3517104

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Using Data Mining Services

In today's globalized marketplace Customer relationship management (CRM) is deemed as crucial business activity to compete efficiently and outdone the competition. CRM strategies heavily depend on how effectively you can use the customer information in meeting their needs and expectations which in turn leads to more profit.

Some basic questions include - what are their specific needs, how satisfied they are with your product or services, is there a scope of improvement in existing product/service and so on. For better CRM strategy you need a predictive data mining models fueled by right data and analysis. Let me give you a basic idea on how you can use Data mining for your CRM objective.

Basic process of CRM data mining includes:
1. Define business goal
2. Construct marketing database
3. Analyze data
4. Visualize a model
5. Explore model
6. Set up model & start monitoring

Let me explain last three steps in detail.

Visualize a Model:
Building a predictive data model is an iterative process. You may require 2-3 models in order to discover the one that best suit your business problem. In searching a right data model you may need to go back, do some changes or even change your problem statement.

In building a model you start with customer data for which the result is already known. For example, you may have to do a test mailing to discover how many people will reply to your mail. You then divide this information into two groups. On the first group, you predict your desired model and apply this on remaining data. Once you finish the estimation and testing process you are left with a model that best suits your business idea.

Explore Model:
Accuracy is the key in evaluating your outcomes. For example, predictive models acquired through data mining may be clubbed with the insights of domain experts and can be used in a large project that can serve to various kinds of people. The way data mining is used in an application is decided by the nature of customer interaction. In most cases either customer contacts you or you contact them.

Set up Model & Start Monitoring:
To analyze customer interactions you need to consider factors like who originated the contact, whether it was direct or social media campaign, brand awareness of your company, etc. Then you select a sample of users to be contacted by applying the model to your existing customer database. In case of advertising campaigns you match the profiles of potential users discovered by your model to the profile of the users your campaign will reach.

In either case, if the input data involves income, age and gender demography, but the model demands gender-to-income or age-to-income ratio then you need to transform your existing database accordingly.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Customer-Relationship-Management-%28CRM%29-Using-Data-Mining-Services&id=4641198

Monday 2 September 2013

PDF Scraping: Making Modern File Formats More Accessible

Data scraping is the process of automatically sorting through information contained on the internet inside html, PDF or other documents and collecting relevant information to into databases and spreadsheets for later retrieval. On most websites, the text is easily and accessibly written in the source code but an increasing number of businesses are using Adobe PDF format (Portable Document Format: A format which can be viewed by the free Adobe Acrobat software on almost any operating system. See below for a link.). The advantage of PDF format is that the document looks exactly the same no matter which computer you view it from making it ideal for business forms, specification sheets, etc.; the disadvantage is that the text is converted into an image from which you often cannot easily copy and paste. PDF Scraping is the process of data scraping information contained in PDF files. To PDF scrape a PDF document, you must employ a more diverse set of tools.

There are two main types of PDF files: those built from a text file and those built from an image (likely scanned in). Adobe's own software is capable of PDF scraping from text-based PDF files but special tools are needed for PDF scraping text from image-based PDF files. The primary tool for PDF scraping is the OCR program. OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, programs scan a document for small pictures that they can separate into letters. These pictures are then compared to actual letters and if matches are found, the letters are copied into a file. OCR programs can perform PDF scraping of image-based PDF files quite accurately but they are not perfect.

Once the OCR program or Adobe program has finished PDF scraping a document, you can search through the data to find the parts you are most interested in. This information can then be stored into your favorite database or spreadsheet program. Some PDF scraping programs can sort the data into databases and/or spreadsheets automatically making your job that much easier.

Quite often you will not find a PDF scraping program that will obtain exactly the data you want without customization. Surprisingly a search on Google only turned up one business, (the amusingly named ScrapeGoat.com http://www.ScrapeGoat.com) that will create a customized PDF scraping utility for your project. A handful of off the shelf utilities claim to be customizable, but seem to require a bit of programming knowledge and time commitment to use effectively. Obtaining the data yourself with one of these tools may be possible but will likely prove quite tedious and time consuming. It may be advisable to contract a company that specializes in PDF scraping to do it for you quickly and professionally.

Let's explore some real world examples of the uses of PDF scraping technology. A group at Cornell University wanted to improve a database of technical documents in PDF format by taking the old PDF file where the links and references were just images of text and changing the links and references into working clickable links thus making the database easy to navigate and cross-reference. They employed a PDF scraping utility to deconstruct the PDF files and figure out where the links were. They then could create a simple script to re-create the PDF files with working links replacing the old text image.

A computer hardware vendor wanted to display specifications data for his hardware on his website. He hired a company to perform PDF scraping of the hardware documentation on the manufacturers' website and save the PDF scraped data into a database he could use to update his webpage automatically.

PDF Scraping is just collecting information that is available on the public internet. PDF Scraping does not violate copyright laws.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?PDF-Scraping:-Making-Modern-File-Formats-More-Accessible&id=193321

Sunday 1 September 2013

Web Data Extraction Services

Web Data Extraction from Dynamic Pages includes some of the services that may be acquired through outsourcing. It is possible to siphon information from proven websites through the use of Data Scrapping software. The information is applicable in many areas in business. It is possible to get such solutions as data collection, screen scrapping, email extractor and Web Data Mining services among others from companies providing websites such as Scrappingexpert.com.

Data mining is common as far as outsourcing business is concerned. Many companies are outsource data mining services and companies dealing with these services can earn a lot of money, especially in the growing business regarding outsourcing and general internet business. With web data extraction, you will pull data in a structured organized format. The source of the information will even be from an unstructured or semi-structured source.

In addition, it is possible to pull data which has originally been presented in a variety of formats including PDF, HTML, and test among others. The web data extraction service therefore, provides a diversity regarding the source of information. Large scale organizations have used data extraction services where they get large amounts of data on a daily basis. It is possible for you to get high accuracy of information in an efficient manner and it is also affordable.

Web data extraction services are important when it comes to collection of data and web-based information on the internet. Data collection services are very important as far as consumer research is concerned. Research is turning out to be a very vital thing among companies today. There is need for companies to adopt various strategies that will lead to fast means of data extraction, efficient extraction of data, as well as use of organized formats and flexibility.

In addition, people will prefer software that provides flexibility as far as application is concerned. In addition, there is software that can be customized according to the needs of customers, and these will play an important role in fulfilling diverse customer needs. Companies selling the particular software therefore, need to provide such features that provide excellent customer experience.

It is possible for companies to extract emails and other communications from certain sources as far as they are valid email messages. This will be done without incurring any duplicates. You will extract emails and messages from a variety of formats for the web pages, including HTML files, text files and other formats. It is possible to carry these services in a fast reliable and in an optimal output and hence, the software providing such capability is in high demand. It can help businesses and companies quickly search contacts for the people to be sent email messages.

It is also possible to use software to sort large amount of data and extract information, in an activity termed as data mining. This way, the company will realize reduced costs and saving of time and increasing return on investment. In this practice, the company will carry out Meta data extraction, scanning data, and others as well.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services&id=4733722