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

Mining XML documents with association rule algorithms

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Computer Engineering, Izmir, 2008Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 59-63)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishx, 63 leavesFollowing the increasing use of XML technology for data storage and data exchange between applications, the subject of mining XML documents has become more researchable and important topic. In this study, we considered the problem of Mining Association Rules between items in XML document. The principal purpose of this study is applying association rule algorithms directly to the XML documents with using XQuery which is a functional expression language that can be used to query or process XML data. We used three different algorithms; Apriori, AprioriTid and High Efficient AprioriTid. We give comparisons of mining times of these three apriori-like algorithms on XML documents using different support levels, different datasets and different dataset sizes

A teachable semi-automatic web information extraction system based on evolved regular expression patterns

This thesis explores Web Information Extraction (WIE) and how it has been used in decision making and to support businesses in their daily operations. The research focuses on a WIE system based on Genetic Programming (GP) with an extensible model to enhance the automatic extractor. This uses a human as a teacher to identify and extract relevant information from the semi-structured HTML webpages. Regular expressions, which have been chosen as the pattern matching tool, are automatically generated based on the training data to provide an improved grammar and lexicon. This particularly benefits the GP system which may need to extend its lexicon in the presence of new tokens in the web pages. These tokens allow the GP method to produce new extraction patterns for new requirements