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

Self-supervised automated wrapper generation for weblog data extraction

Data extraction from the web is notoriously hard. Of the types of resources available on the web, weblogs are becoming increasingly important due to the continued growth of the blogosphere, but remain poorly explored. Past approaches to data extraction from weblogs have often involved manual intervention and suffer from low scalability. This paper proposes a fully automated information extraction methodology based on the use of web feeds and processing of HTML. The approach includes a model for generating a wrapper that exploits web feeds for deriving a set of extraction rules automatically. Instead of performing a pairwise comparison between posts, the model matches the values of the web feeds against their corresponding HTML elements retrieved from multiple weblog posts. It adopts a probabilistic approach for deriving a set of rules and automating the process of wrapper generation. An evaluation of the model is conducted on a dataset of 2,393 posts and the results (92% accuracy) show that the proposed technique enables robust extraction of weblog properties and can be applied across the blogosphere for applications such as improved information retrieval and more robust web preservation initiatives