Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey

Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information Extraction. This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System

Semantic Technologies for Manuscript Descriptions — Concepts and Visions

The contribution at hand relates recent developments in the area of the World Wide Web to codicological research. In the last number of years, an informational extension of the internet has been discussed and extensively researched: the Semantic Web. It has already been applied in many areas, including digital information processing of cultural heritage data. The Semantic Web facilitates the organisation and linking of data across websites, according to a given semantic structure. Software can then process this structural and semantic information to extract further knowledge. In the area of codicological research, many institutions are making efforts to improve the online availability of handwritten codices. If these resources could also employ Semantic Web techniques, considerable research potential could be unleashed. However, data acquisition from less structured data sources will be problematic. In particular, data stemming from unstructured sources needs to be made accessible to SemanticWeb tools through information extraction techniques. In the area of museum research, the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) has been widely examined and is being adopted successfully. The CRM translates well to Semantic Web research, and its concentration on contextualization of objects could support approaches in codicological research. Further concepts for the creation and management of bibliographic coherences and structured vocabularies related to the CRM will be considered in this chapter. Finally, a user scenario showing all processing steps in their context will be elaborated on

Automatic annotation of bioinformatics workflows with biomedical ontologies

Legacy scientific workflows, and the services within them, often present scarce and unstructured (i.e. textual) descriptions. This makes it difficult to find, share and reuse them, thus dramatically reducing their value to the community. This paper presents an approach to annotating workflows and their subcomponents with ontology terms, in an attempt to describe these artifacts in a structured way. Despite a dearth of even textual descriptions, we automatically annotated 530 myExperiment bioinformatics-related workflows, including more than 2600 workflow-associated services, with relevant ontological terms. Quantitative evaluation of the Information Content of these terms suggests that, in cases where annotation was possible at all, the annotation quality was comparable to manually curated bioinformatics resources.Comment: 6th International Symposium on Leveraging Applications (ISoLA 2014 conference), 15 pages, 4 figure