Friday 26 April 2013

Data Extraction

If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to understand what exactly data extraction is, rest assured, you are certainly not alone. Most people find this topic very confusing. It is basically the process of retrieving information from various data services which are poorly structured or sometimes completely unstructured. This binary data is then transferred to data storage or used for further data processing.

What Does Data Extraction Mean to You?

Still not sure how data extraction relates to you or your business? Simply put, if you need nearly any type of information gathered from the web, a company such as Fetch Technologies can retrieve it for you. Internet pages in xml, html, etc., are typically thought of as being unstructured because there is such a wide variety of styles, codes, and practices. This means that data extraction from the web is not only an intricate process, it’s incredibly customizable based on where the source of the information is coming from.

Types of Data Extraction

There are many different types and levels of data extraction, all of which are quite confusing. Fortunately, Fetch will be able to determine exactly what you need based on your end goals.

• Website Scraping – This level of data extraction involves taking data or html from the web and transforming it into organized format. Web scraping programs simulate a person who would be viewing a website. Common uses of this type of data extraction include massive amounts of specific information that would be difficult to do by hand. Marketers often employ this to gather potential customer information while any size company finds this handy to compare their own strategies with their competition.

• Screen Scraping – This involves collecting images from a website or program. This type of data extraction is quite similar to website scraping. A good example of this would be if a real estate agent wanted to scrape the web to find information on pricing in a specific area or find offers that have been placed on a home.

• Web Crawler – This typically refers to a type of data extraction program that search engines use to crawl websites for determining indexing information. A business may choose to use this type of program to gather pricing information from their competition while a scientist may find this level of data extraction handy to determine which sites should be used for research.

Who Should You Trust?

So, which company or program will you trust for your data extraction needs? Fetch Live Access automatically aggregates and normalizes and then goes on to integrate online data into a designated system you have chosen. This means that instead of you and your team searching for data, you can spend your time in a more productive way actually doing something with that obtained information.Visit Fetch Technologies online, call them at 310-414-9849 or email them with questions at sales@fetch.com. Fetch Live Access can handle all of your data extraction needs by giving you business information in real-time that you can actually use.

Source: http://www.fetch.com/data-extraction-articles/

Note:

Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on Web Screen Scraping, Scraping A Website, Extract Data From Website, Website Screen Scraping and Scrape A Website etc.

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