Data Mining - Critical for Businesses to Tap the Unexplored Market

Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) is an emerging field and is increasingly gaining importance in today's business. The knowledge discovery process, however, is vast, involving understanding of the business and its requirements, data selection, processing, mining and evaluation or interpretation; it does not have any pre-defined set of rules to go about solving a problem. Among the other stages, the data mining process holds high importance as the task involves identification of new patterns that have not been detected earlier from the dataset. This is relatively a broad concept involving web mining, text mining, online mining etc.

What Data Mining is and what it is not?

The data mining is the process of extracting information, which has been collected, analyzed and prepared, from the dataset and identifying new patterns from that information. At this juncture, it is also important to understand what it is not. The concept is often misunderstood for knowledge gathering, processing, analysis and interpretation/ inference derivation. While these processes are absolutely not data mining, they are very much necessary for its successful implementation.

The 'First-mover Advantage'

One of the major goals of the data mining process is to identify an unknown or rather unexplored segment that had always existed in the business or industry, but was overlooked. The process, when done meticulously using appropriate techniques, could even make way for niche segments providing companies the first-mover advantage. In any industry, the first-mover would bag the maximum benefits and exploit resources besides setting standards for other players to follow. The whole process is thus considered to be a worthy approach to identify unknown segments.

The online knowledge collection and research is the concept involving many complications and, therefore, outsourcing the data mining services often proves viable for large companies that cannot devote time for the task. Outsourcing the web mining services or text mining services would save an organization's productive time which would otherwise be spent in researching.

The data mining algorithms and challenges

Every data mining task follows certain algorithms using statistical methods, cluster analysis or decision tree techniques. However, there is no single universally accepted technique that can be adopted for all. Rather, the process completely depends on the nature of the business, industry and its requirements. Thus, appropriate methods have to be chosen depending upon the business operations.

The whole process is a subset of knowledge discovery process and as such involves different challenges. Analysis and preparation of dataset is very crucial as the well-researched material could assist in extracting only the relevant yet unidentified information useful for the business. Hence, the analysis of the gathered material and preparation of dataset, which also considers industrial standards during the process, would consume more time and labor. Investment is another major challenge in the process as it involves huge cost on deploying professionals with adequate domain knowledge plus knowledge on statistical and technological aspects.

The importance of maintaining a comprehensive database prompted the need for data mining which, in turn, paved way for niche concepts. Though the concept has been present for years now, companies faced with ever growing competition have realized its importance only in the recent years. Besides being relevant, the dataset from where the information is actually extracted also has to be sufficient enough so as to pull out and identify a new dimension. Yet, a standardized approach would result in better understanding and implementation of the newly identified patterns.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining---Critical-for-Businesses-to-Tap-the-Unexplored-Market&id=6745886

The Benefits of Data Outsourcing

Data is the foundation of all companies and provides a source for multiplying your company with tremendous leaps and bounds. The benefits of data entry outsourcing are numerous with expansion of methodologies, which provide your business with many other numerous benefits. Data entry is a generalized term, which entails virtual services like data mining, data conversion, image processing, web data entry, data extraction and many others. All of these tasks are very much a stronghold in getting the processes of any company streamlined without wasting time and resources.

If you think about the benefits of data-entry outsourcing, it is necessary for any company to add the need of data entry along with other important resources, which go with this task. It is also important to know the format, which the final version of data is to be utilized. You want to go for data that is available for usage in a cross platform environment.

There are many benefits of outsourcing. In today's society, data-entry services offer peace of mine as well as a sigh of relief for business owners. Here are some benefits which data-entry outsourcing companies can offer your company:

o Your complete data management needs being taken care of. When you outsource your data-entry needs to an outside company, you are going to benefit with having managed and synchronized data. This will ensure that your company will save time. The best thing about outsourcing companies is that some of the managed data can be utilized for repository purposes.

o Time is very critical when dealing with competition. You want to get data in and out of your business in order to reap the maximum possible benefits in the least amount of time. Utilizing an outsourcing company minimizes your time spent while improving the efficiency of your business processes.

o Your sole purpose for utilizing data-entry outsourcing companies should be to receive quality as well as the most quantity for your dollar. Quality cannot be compromised. Quantity also needs to be delivered fast and on time. There is no leeway given when it comes to data entry work. Receiving data-entry work on time with fast turn around allows your business to benefit with the business overhead.

o Outsourcing companies are affordable and what does this mean for your business? This will reduce your business costs while maximizing your profits.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Benefits-of-Data-Outsourcing&id=3331295

Know What the Truth Behind Data Mining Outsourcing Service

We came to that, what we call the information age where industries are like useful data needed for decision-making, the creation of products - among other essential uses for business. Information mining and converting them to useful information is a part of this trend that allows companies to reach their optimum potential. However, many companies that do not meet even one deal with data mining question because they are simply overwhelmed with other important tasks. This is where data mining outsourcing comes in.

There have been many definitions to introduced, but it can be simply explained as a process that involves sorting through large amounts of raw data to extract valuable information needed by industries and enterprises in various fields. In most cases this is done by professionals, professional organizations and financial analysts. He has seen considerable growth in the number of sectors or groups that enter my self.
There are a number of reasons why there is a rapid growth in data mining outsourcing service subscriptions. Some of them are presented below:

A wide range of services

Many companies are turning to information mining outsourcing, because they cover a wide range of services. These services include, but are not limited to data from web applications congregation database, collect contact information from different sites, extract data from websites using the software, the sort of stories from sources news, information and accumulate commercial competitors.

Many companies fall

Many industries benefit because it is fast and realistic. The information extracted by data mining service providers of outsourcing used in crucial decisions in the field of direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, health, scientific tests and other experimental work, telecommunications, financial services, and a whole lot more.

A lot of advantages

Subscribe data mining outsourcing services it's offers many benefits, as providers assures customers to render services to world standards. They strive to work with improved technologies, scalability, sophisticated infrastructure, resources, timeliness, cost, the system safer for the security of information and increased market coverage.

Outsourcing allows companies to focus their core business and can improve overall productivity. Not surprisingly, information mining outsourcing has been a first choice of many companies - to propel the business to higher profits.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Know-What-the-Truth-Behind-Data-Mining-Outsourcing-Service&id=5303589

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Data scrape is the process of extracting data from web by using software program from proven website only. Extracted data any one can use for any purposes as per the desires in various industries as the web having every important data of the world. We provide best of the web data extracting software. We have the expertise and one of kind knowledge in web data extraction, image scrapping, screen scrapping, email extract services, data mining, web grabbing.

Who can use Data Scraping Services?

Data scraping and extraction services can be used by any organization, company, or any firm who would like to have a data from particular industry, data of targeted customer, particular company, or anything which is available on net like data of email id, website name, search term or anything which is available on web. Most of time a marketing company like to use data scraping and data extraction services to do marketing for a particular product in certain industry and to reach the targeted customer for example if X company like to contact a restaurant of California city, so our software can extract the data of restaurant of California city and a marketing company can use this data to market their restaurant kind of product. MLM and Network marketing company also use data extraction and data scrapping services to to find a new customer by extracting data of certain prospective customer and can contact customer by telephone, sending a postcard, email marketing, and this way they build their huge network and build large group for their own product and company.

We helped many companies to find particular data as per their need for example.

Web Data Extraction

Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Because of this, tool kits that scrape web content were created. A web scraper is an API to extract data from a web site. We help you to create a kind of API which helps you to scrape data as per your need. We provide quality and affordable web Data Extraction application

Data Collection

Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using info structures suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. That's why the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user.

Email Extractor

A tool which helps you to extract the email ids from any reliable sources automatically that is called a email extractor. It basically services the function of collecting business contacts from various web pages, HTML files, text files or any other format without duplicates email ids.

Screen scrapping

Screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text information from a computer display terminal's screen and collecting visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping.

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services is the process of extracting patterns from information. Datamining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. Any format including MS excels, CSV, HTML and many such formats according to your requirements.

Web spider

A Web spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Web Grabber

Web grabber is just a other name of the data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot is software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. Web bot software is the best program to pull out articles, blog, relevant website content and many such website related data We have worked with many clients for data extracting, data scrapping and data mining they are really happy with our services we provide very quality services and make your work data work very easy and automatic.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Web-Data-Extraction-Services-Will-Save-Your-Time-and-Money-by-Automatic-Data-Collection&id=5159023

Data Mining Questions? Some Back-Of-The-Envelope Answers

Data mining, the discovery and modeling of hidden patterns in large volumes of data, is becoming a mainstream technology. And yet, for many, the prospect of initiating a data mining (DM) project remains daunting. Chief among the concerns of those considering DM is, "How do I know if data mining is right for my organization?"

A meaningful response to this concern hinges on three underlying questions:

    Economics - Do you have a pressing business/economic need, a "pain" that needs to be addressed immediately?
    Data - Do you have, or can you acquire, sufficient data that are relevant to the business need?
    Performance - Do you need a DM solution to produce a moderate gain in business performance compared to current practice?

By the time you finish reading this article, you will be able to answer these questions for yourself on the back of an envelope. If all answers are yes, data mining is a good fit for your business need. Any no answers indicate areas to focus on before proceeding with DM.

In the following sections, we'll consider each of the above questions in the context of a sales and marketing case study. Since DM applies to a wide spectrum of industries, we will also generalize each of the solution principles.

To begin, suppose that Donna is the VP of Marketing for a trade organization. She is responsible for several trade shows and a large annual meeting. Attendance was good for many years, and she and her staff focused their efforts on creating an excellent meeting experience (program plus venue). Recently, however, there has been declining response to promotions, and a simultaneous decline in attendance. Is data mining right for Donna and her organization?

Economics - Begin with economics - Is there a pressing business need? Donna knows that meeting attendance was down 15% this year. If that trend continues for two more years, turnout will be only about 60% of its previous level (85% x 85% x 85%), and she knows that the annual meeting is not sustainable at that level. It is critical, then, to improve the attendance, but to do so profitably. Yes, Donna has an economic need.

Generally speaking, data mining can address a wide variety of business "pains". If your company is experiencing rapid growth, DM can identify promising new retail locations or find more prospects for your online service. Conversely, if your organization is facing declining sales, DM can improve retention or identify your best existing customers for cross-selling and upselling. It is not advisable, however, to start a data mining effort without explicitly identifying a critical business need. Vast sums have been spent wastefully on mining data for "nuggets" of knowledge that have little or no value to the enterprise.

Data - Next, consider your data assets - Are sufficient, relevant data available? Donna has a spreadsheet that captures several years of meeting registrations (who attended). She also maintains a promotion history (who was sent a meeting invitation) in a simple database. So, information is available about the stimulus (sending invitations) and the response (did/did not attend). This data is clearly relevant to understanding and improving future attendance.

Donna's multi-year registration spreadsheet contains about 10,000 names. The promotion history database is even larger because many invitations are sent for each meeting, both to prior attendees and to prospects who have never attended. Sounds like plenty of data, but to be sure, it is useful to think about the factors that might be predictive of future attendance. Donna consults her intuitive knowledge of the meeting participants and lists four key factors:

    attended previously
    age
    size of company
    industry

To get a reasonable estimate for the amount of data required, we can use the following rule of thumb, developed from many years of experience:

Number of records needed ≥ 60 x 2^N (where N is the number of factors)

Since Donna listed 4 key factors, the above formula estimates that she needs 960 records (60 x 2^4 = 60 x 16). Since she has more than 10,000, we conclude Yes, Donna has relevant and sufficient data for DM.

More generally, in considering your own situation, it is important to have data that represents:

    stimulus and response (what was done and what happened)
    positive and negative outcomes

Simply put, you need data on both what works and what doesn't.

Performance - Finally, performance - Is a moderate improvement required relative to current benchmarks? Donna would like to increase attendance back to its previous level without increasing her promotion costs. She determines that the response rate to promotions needs to increase from 2% to 2.5% to meet her goals. In data mining terms, a moderate improvement is generally in the range of 10% to 100%. Donna's need is in this interval, at 25%. For her, Yes, a moderate performance increase is needed.

The performance question is typically the hardest one to address prior to starting a project. Performance is an outcome of the data mining effort, not a precursor to it. There are no guarantees, but we can use past experience as a guide. As noted for Donna above, incremental-to-moderate improvements are reasonable to expect with data mining. But don't expect DM to produce a miracle.

Conclusion

Summarizing, to determine if data mining fits your organization, you must consider:

    your business need
    your available data assets
    the performance improvement required

In the case study, Donna answered yes to each of the questions posed. She is well-positioned to proceed with a data mining project. You, too, can apply the same thought process before you spend a single dollar on DM. If you decide there is a fit, this preparation will serve you well in talking with your staff, vendors, and consultants who can help you move a data mining project forward.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Questions?-Some-Back-Of-The-Envelope-Answers&id=6047713

Advantages of Online Data Entry Services

People all over the world are enthusiastic to buy online data entry services as they find it cost effective. Most of them have an impression that they get quality services against the prices they have to pay. Entering data online is of a great help to business units of all sizes as they consider them as their main basis of profession.

Online data entering and typing services providers have skilled resources at their service who deliver quality work timely. These service providers have modernized technology, assuring cent percent security of data. Online data entry services include the following:

    Data entry
    Data Processing
    Product entry
    Data typing
    Data mining, Data capture/collection
    Business Process Outsourcing
    Data Conversion
    Form Filling
    Web and mortgage research
    Extraction services
    Online copying, pasting, editing, sorting, as well as indexing data
    E-books and e-magazines data entry

Get companies world wide quality services to business units of all sizes, some of the common input formats are:

    PDF
    TIFF
    GIF
    XBM
    JPG
    PNG
    BMP
    TGA
    XML
    HTML
    SGML
    Printed documents
    Hard copies, etc

Benefits of outsourcing online data entering services:

Major benefits of data entry for business units is that they get the facts and figures which helps in taking strategic decisions for the organization. The data projected by numbers turns to be a factor of evaluation that accelerates the progress of the business. Online data typing services maintain high level of security by using systems that are highly protected.

The business organization progresses because of right decisions taken with the help of superior quality data available.

    Save operational overhead expense.
    Saves time and space.
    Accurate services can be accessed.
    Eliminating the paper documents.
    Cost effective.
    Data accessible from anywhere in the world.
    100% work satisfaction.
    Access to professional and experienced data typing services.
    Adequate knowledge of wide range industrial needs.
    Use of highly advance technologies for quality results.

Business organizations find themselves blessed because of the benefits they receive out of outsourcing their projects on online data entering and typing services, because it not only saves their time but also saves a huge amount of money.

Upcoming business companies can focus on their key business functions instead of dealing with non-key business activities. They find it sensible to outsource their confidential and crucial projects to trustworthy online data entry services and remain free for their key business activities. These companies have several layers of quality control which assures 99.9% quality on projects on online data entry.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Advantages-of-Online-Data-Entry-Services&id=6526483

An Easy Way For Data Extraction

There are so many data scraping tools are available in internet. With these tools you can you download large amount of data without any stress. From the past decade, the internet revolution has made the entire world as an information center. You can obtain any type of information from the internet. However, if you want any particular information on one task, you need search more websites. If you are interested in download all the information from the websites, you need to copy the information and pate in your documents. It seems a little bit hectic work for everyone. With these scraping tools, you can save your time, money and it reduces manual work.

The Web data extraction tool will extract the data from the HTML pages of the different websites and compares the data. Every day, there are so many websites are hosting in internet. It is not possible to see all the websites in a single day. With these data mining tool, you are able to view all the web pages in internet. If you are using a wide range of applications, these scraping tools are very much useful to you.

The data extraction software tool is used to compare the structured data in internet. There are so many search engines in internet will help you to find a website on a particular issue. The data in different sites is appears in different styles. This scraping expert will help you to compare the date in different site and structures the data for records.

And the web crawler software tool is used to index the web pages in the internet; it will move the data from internet to your hard disk. With this work, you can browse the internet much faster when connected. And the important use of this tool is if you are trying to download the data from internet in off peak hours. It will take a lot of time to download. However, with this tool you can download any data from internet at fast rate.There is another tool for business person is called email extractor. With this toll, you can easily target the customers email addresses. You can send advertisement for your product to the targeted customers at any time. This the best tool to find the database of the customers.

However, there are some more scraping tolls are available in internet. And also some of esteemed websites are providing the information about these tools. You download these tools by paying a nominal amount.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?An-Easy-Way-For-Data-Extraction&id=3517104

Why a Proxy Service is an Essential Affiliate Marketing Tool

As an intermediate or advanced affiliate marketer it is essential that you use a private proxy service as your privacy partner to hide your computer IP address and allow anonymous surfing. This is especially true if you are researching sites or creating many social media property accounts in your Internet Marketing promotion efforts.

So exactly what is a private proxy service and why should you use one?

When your computer connects to the Internet it queries different servers and passes on requests for information or resources. When you enter a website; the website server identifies your computer IP address and passes this data and more. Many E-commerce sites will log your IP address and use it to identify browsing patterns for marketing purposes.

In order to retain your personal privacy and computer security there are services and applications that can keep your computer information hidden and allow you to surf the Web anonymously, in other words hide your IP.

A proxy server is an application or computer system that serves as a buffer between your computer and the website you are on. Your computer (nicknamed client) would connect to a proxy server. The proxy server would then connect you to your destination or resource while passing your information through a filter. For example, a proxy service may filter traffic by IP address or protocol. Some proxy servers will process your computer request in real time and some rely on cashed memory in order to be more resourceful and increase performance speed.

As you may have guessed there are many types of proxy services and types. As an average user you do not need to go overboard and many basic services will do the job.

Although there are free methods to scrape proxy IP addresses that can work, paid services are easier to use and provide an automatic user interface (plug and play).

Some experienced users utilize paid services that offer a combination of automatic proxies and user configuration that give you more control and the option of manually enter IPs or IP switching intervals.

If you are not yet using a private proxy service [http://www.internetmarketingduru.com/PrivateProxyService] in your Internet Marketing I recommend you start immediately. This is an inexpensive but vital service for your marketing business. Visit my blog for more information on how to choose and set up a private proxy service use a proxy service




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-a-Proxy-Service-is-an-Essential-Affiliate-Marketing-Tool&id=4307909

Data Mining vs Screen-Scraping

Data mining isn't screen-scraping. I know that some people in the room may disagree with that statement, but they're actually two almost completely different concepts.

In a nutshell, you might state it this way: screen-scraping allows you to get information, where data mining allows you to analyze information. That's a pretty big simplification, so I'll elaborate a bit.

The term "screen-scraping" comes from the old mainframe terminal days where people worked on computers with green and black screens containing only text. Screen-scraping was used to extract characters from the screens so that they could be analyzed. Fast-forwarding to the web world of today, screen-scraping now most commonly refers to extracting information from web sites. That is, computer programs can "crawl" or "spider" through web sites, pulling out data. People often do this to build things like comparison shopping engines, archive web pages, or simply download text to a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered and analyzed.

Data mining, on the other hand, is defined by Wikipedia as the "practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns." In other words, you already have the data, and you're now analyzing it to learn useful things about it. Data mining often involves lots of complex algorithms based on statistical methods. It has nothing to do with how you got the data in the first place. In data mining you only care about analyzing what's already there.

The difficulty is that people who don't know the term "screen-scraping" will try Googling for anything that resembles it. We include a number of these terms on our web site to help such folks; for example, we created pages entitled Text Data Mining, Automated Data Collection, Web Site Data Extraction, and even Web Site Ripper (I suppose "scraping" is sort of like "ripping"). So it presents a bit of a problem-we don't necessarily want to perpetuate a misconception (i.e., screen-scraping = data mining), but we also have to use terminology that people will actually use.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-vs-Screen-Scraping&id=146813

Has It Been Done Before? Optimize Your Patent Search Using Patent Scraping Technology

Has it been done before? Optimize your Patent Search using Patent Scraping Technology.

Since the US patent office opened in 1790, inventors across the United States have been submitting all sorts of great products and half-baked ideas to their database. Nowadays, many individuals get ideas for great products only to have the patent office do a patent search and tell them that their ideas have already been patented by someone else! Herin lies a question: How do I perform a patent search to find out if my invention has already been patented before I invest time and money into developing it?

The US patent office patent search database is available to anyone with internet access.

US Patent Search Homepage

Performing a patent search with the patent searching tools on the US Patent office webpage can prove to be a very time consuming process. For example, patent searching the database for "dog" and "food" yields 5745 patent search results. The straight-forward approach to investigating the patent search results for your particular idea is to go through all 5745 results one at a time looking for yours. Get some munchies and settle in, this could take a while! The patent search database sorts results by patent number instead of relevancy. This means that if your idea was recently patented, you will find it near the top but if it wasn't, you could be searching for quite a while. Also, most patent search results have images associated with them. Downloading and displaying these images over the internet can be very time consuming depending on you internet connection and the availability of the patent search database servers.

Because patent searches take such a long time, many companies and organizations are looking ways to improve the process. Some organizations and companies will hire employees for the sole purpose of performing patent searches for them. Others contract out the job to small business that specialize in patent searches. The latest technology for performing patent searches is called patent scraping.

Patent scraping is the process of writing computer automated scripts that analyze a website and copy only the content you are interested in into easily accessible databases or spreadsheets on your computer. Because it is a computerized script performing the patent search, you don't need a separate employee to get the data, you can let it run the patent scraping while you perform other important tasks! Patent scraping technology can also extract text content from images. By saving the images and textual content to your computer, you can then very efficiently search them for content and relevancy; thus saving you lots of time that could be better spent actually inventing something!

To put a real-world face on this, let us consider the pharmaceutical industry. Many different companies are competing for the patent on the next big drug. It has become an indispensible tactic of the industry for one company to perform patent searches for what patents the other companies are applying for, thus learning in which direction the research and development team of the other company is taking them. Using this information, the company can then choose to either pursue that direction heavily, or spin off in a different direction. It would quickly become very costly to maintain a team of researchers dedicated to only performing patent searches all day. Patent scraping technology is the means for figuring out what ideas and technologies are coming about before they make headline news. It is by utilizing patent scraping technology that the large companies stay up to date on the latest trends in technology.

While some companies choose to hire their own programming team to do their patent scraping scripts for them, it is much more cost effective to contract out the job to a qualified team of programmers dedicated to performing such services.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Has-It-Been-Done-Before?-Optimize-Your-Patent-Search-Using-Patent-Scraping-Technology&id=171000

What is Data Mining? Why Data Mining is Important?

Searching, Collecting, Filtering and Analyzing of data define as data mining. The large amount of information can be retrieved from wide range of form such as different data relationships, patterns or any significant statistical co-relations. Today the advent of computers, large databases and the internet is make easier way to collect millions, billions and even trillions of pieces of data that can be systematically analyzed to help look for relationships and to seek solutions to difficult problems.

The government, private company, large organization and all businesses are looking for large volume of information collection for research and business development. These all collected data can be stored by them to future use. Such kind of information is most important whenever it is require. It will take very much time for searching and find require information from the internet or any other resources.

Here is an overview of data mining services inclusion:

* Market research, product research, survey and analysis
* Collection information about investors, funds and investments
* Forums, blogs and other resources for customer views/opinions
* Scanning large volumes of data
* Information extraction
* Pre-processing of data from the data warehouse
* Meta data extraction
* Web data online mining services
* data online mining research
* Online newspaper and news sources information research
* Excel sheet presentation of data collected from online sources
* Competitor analysis
* data mining books
* Information interpretation
* Updating collected data

After applying the process of data mining, you can easily information extract from filtered information and processing the refining the information. This data process is mainly divided into 3 sections; pre-processing, mining and validation. In short, data online mining is a process of converting data into authentic information.

The most important is that it takes much time to find important information from the data. If you want to grow your business rapidly, you must take quick and accurate decisions to grab timely available opportunities.

Outsourcing Web Research is one of the best data mining outsourcing organizations having more than 17 years of experience in the market research industry. To know more information about our company please contact us.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?What-is-Data-Mining?-Why-Data-Mining-is-Important?&id=3613677

Screen Scraping Software That Will Traverse Pages

We’re creating a mashup site that pulls information from many sources all over the web. Many of these sites don’t provide RSS feeds or APIs to access the information they provide. This leaves us with screen scraping as our method for collecting the data.

There are many scripting tools out there written in different scripting languages for screen scraping that require you to write scraping scripts in the language the scraper was written in. Scrapy, scrAPI, and scrubyt are a few written in Ruby and Python.

There are other web-based tools I’ve seen like Dapper that create XML or RSS feeds based on a webpage. It has a beautiful web-based interface that requires no scripting skills to use. This would be a great tool, if it were able to traverse multiple pages to gather data from hundreds pages of results.

We need something that will scrape information from paginated web sites, much like scrubyt, but with a user interface that a non-programmer could use. We’ll script up our own solution if we need to, probably using scrubyt, but if there’s a better solution out there, we want to use it. Does anything like this exist?

Yahoo Pipes comes to mind, it’s easy to use for a non programmer, although you should really learn regex to get it’s full potential.

Scrapinghub (from the creators of Scrapy) offers a pay-for service for non-programmers similar to Mozenda.

I’ve been using iMacros to scrape data from websites. It is usable by someone with no programming experience and with some basic programming skills you can greatly extend its capabilities. Here’s a tutorial.

iMacros is particularly useful if you need to perform some action to retrieve the data. It can click on buttons, navigate through flash, select from menus, fill in forms etc.

There’s also Scraperwiki, which requires programming skills. Non-programmers can pay for assistance.


Source: http://www.eonlinegratis.com/2013/screen-scraping-software-that-will-traverse-pages/

Screen Scraping Content To Excel via Web Connectors

My friends love to tease me for being a "spreadsheet guy" because I make spreadsheets for nearly everything under the sun.  Mostly product comparisons, financial analysis(ish), stuff like that.

One spreadsheet that I work on very frequently deals with 401k fund options from my employer.  Due diligence on 150 funds is a time consuming process.  To help me make semi-educated picks I browse finance.yahoo.com to look at stats such as the beta, expense ratio, manager tenure, turnover, yield, (1, 3, 5, 10) year load adjusted returns, etc.

The problem? These stats change constantly, and manually updating a spreadsheet is a chore!

Recently I was investigating data streams for a keystroke biometric project that I'm working on and came across some information that led me to believe that creating data connections through Excel would be a snap.

If you open MS Excel 2007+ and go to the Data tab you'll notice there are several external data connection options (Access, Web, Text).

If you jab the "Web" button it'll open your default IE home page within a window with Yellow boxes and black arrows all over.  These boxes identify html table structures.  By selecting one (or more) of these tables you are indicating to the web connector that you'd like to import that content. Click ok and it'll give you the option to import that content into an existing worksheet or a new one.

Rather than creating unique connections via the UI, you could create and point to saved data connectors (.iqy files).  Click the "Existing Connections" button and you'll uncover 3 examples from MSN Money, 2 of which are templates that once connected allow you to map your variables.
I've set my connections to update upon file open and that process takes approximately 1.5 minutes for 24 connectors, so just under 4 seconds per record.  I'm assuming that I can extrapolate that number out to 9 minutes for the 150 connectors I'll eventually need (based upon a template using a single .iqy file I wrote).  While I'm not very patient when it comes to waiting for files to open, the reality is that having to do this manually would take me about 2 hours, so 9 minutes doesn't seem all that bad.

I wish Access had a feature where I could schedule the imports! But then again I'm sure there is a more elegant solution to my problem here.  So with that said, if anyone has suggestions for alternate ways to extract mutual fund data for analysis (to a database, XML, excel or whatever) I'd be all ears!


Source: http://xuexideshengsuo.blogspot.in/2010/10/screen-scraping-content-to-excel-via.html