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Web Harvesting

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

  • 44 Accesses

Synonyms

Web data extraction; Web information extraction; Web mining

Definition

Web harvesting describes the process of gathering and integrating data from various heterogeneous web sources. Necessary input is an appropriate knowledge representation of the domain of interest (e.g., an ontology), together with example instances of concepts or relationships (seed knowledge). Output is a structured data (e.g., in the form of a relational database) that is gathered from the Web. The term harvesting implies that, while passing over a large body of available information, the process gathers only such information that lies in the domain of interest and is, as such, relevant.

Key Points

The process of web harvesting can be divided into three subsequent tasks:

  1. (i)

    Data or information retrieval, which involves finding relevant information on the Web and storing it locally. This task requires tools for searching and navigating the Web, i.e., crawlers and means for interacting with dynamic or...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Ciravegna F, Chapman S, Dingli A, Wilks Y. Learning to harvest information for the Semantic Web. In: Proceedings of the 1st European Semantic Web Symposium; 2004. p. 312–26.

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  2. Crescenzi V, Mecca G. Automatic information extraction from large websites. J ACM. 2004;51(5):731–79.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Etzioni O, Cafarella MJ, Downey D, Kok S, Popescu AM, Shaked T, Soderland S, Weld DS, Yates A. Web-scale information extraction in KnowItAll: (preliminary results). In: Proceedings of the 12th International World Wide Web Conference; 2004. p. 100–10.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Wolfgang Gatterbauer

Authors
  1. Wolfgang Gatterbauer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wolfgang Gatterbauer .

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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Cite this entry

Gatterbauer, W. (2018). Web Harvesting. 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_1172

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