BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology

This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform

Fuzzy Content Mining for Targeted Advertisement

Content-targeted advertising system is becoming an increasingly important part of the funding source of free web services. Highly efficient content analysis is the pivotal key of such a system. This project aims to establish a content analysis engine involving fuzzy logic that is able to automatically analyze real user-posted Web documents such as blog entries. Based on the analysis result, the system matches and retrieves the most appropriate Web advertisements. The focus and complexity is on how to better estimate and acquire the keywords that represent a given Web document. Fuzzy Web mining concept will be applied to synthetically consider multiple factors of Web content. A Fuzzy Ranking System is established based on certain fuzzy (and some crisp) rules, fuzzy sets, and membership functions to get the best candidate keywords. Once it is has obtained the keywords, the system will retrieve corresponding advertisements from certain providers through Web services as matched advertisements, similarly to retrieving a products list from Amazon.com. In 87% of the cases, the results of this system can match the accuracy of the Google Adwords system. Furthermore, this expandable system will also be a solid base for further research and development on this topic