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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2065–2072Cite as

Languages for Web Data Extraction

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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

  1. Arasu A, Garcia-Molina H. Extracting structured data from Web pages. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 2003. p. 337–48.

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  2. Baumgartner R, Flesca S, Gottlob G. Visual web information extraction with Lixto. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 2001. p. 119–28.

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  3. Crescenzi V, Mecca G, Merialdo P. RoadRunner: towards automatic data extraction from large web sites. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 2001.

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  4. Kistler T, Marais H. WebL – a programming language for the web. Comput Netw ISDN Syst. 1998;30(1–7):259–70.

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  5. Knoblock CA, Lerman K, Minton S, Muslea I. Accurately and reliably extracting data from the web: a machine learning approach. In: Szczepaniak PS, Segovia J, Kacprzyk J, Zadeh LA, editors. Intelligent exploration of the web. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag; 2003. p. 275–87.

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  6. Kushmerick N. Wrapper induction: efficiency and expressiveness. Artif Intell. 2000;118(1–2):15–68. Special issue on Intelligent Internet Systems.

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  8. Liu L, Pu C, Han W. XWRAP: an XML-enabled wrapper construction system for web information sources. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Data Engineering; 2000.

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  10. Sahuguet A, Azavant F. Building intelligent web applications using lightweight wrappers. Data Knowl Eng. 2000;36(3):283–316.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. VMWare, Seattle, WA, USA

    Nicholas Kushmerick

Authors
  1. Nicholas Kushmerick
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nicholas Kushmerick .

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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Kushmerick, N. (2018). Languages for Web Data Extraction. 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_1156

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