Make Sure the Pricing is Precise
Web data extraction is the process to collect data from web and use it for one time or store it for later usage. Web data crawling, web data scraping, various file downloads from web, collecting various files from FTP or various storages, all are part of web data extraction.
The process brings data from various formats like csv, html, json, js, txt, etc.
The source of the data is very versatile, and the structure is defined by the publisher. And hence the structure of the data various for every web site and sources of the data.
Inspite of having the data unstructured or versatile, the target goal is to convert the data into some structured format which a machine (program) can understand later.
There are various sources having different structure, however the process output needs to be stored in a homogeneous structure so that it stored and kept together for purpose of better understanding.
Type of Data from Web Data Extraction
Such data can be
- 1. Ecommerce Product information
- 2. Product pricing information for various ecommerce products, travel products, airline routes, hotel stays, and so on
- 3. Various directory information which mentions contact information of various organizations
- 4. Various groups, institutes, organizations which mentions their members, associates, etc information
- 5. People information, organization information
- 6. Financial information like balance sheet, profit and loss, stock price
- 7. News information
- 8. And so on. The list is very big
As we know there is a huge amount of data every organization or institute is having with them, and they have built (or in the process of building) various application of such data.
Data Mining and Web Data Mining
Now, sometimes the data is published for some different purpose, but to use the data differently, it is required to get stored in a structured format, in database, or text files for various analysis. Sometimes the publishers of the data provide APIs to use the data. Such API access is free or chargeable. In case when such direct data access is not available, in such situations, it becomes very difficult to develop new use of the same data in absence of the data. Here the web data extraction comes as a big help.
Using web data extraction, we can collect information available on web, we can store the information in local store and do further processing. We may also correlate the information collected from various sources and join them for a particular context. This process is called Data Mining. Since we have collected data from web, the process sometimes is called as web data mining. However, it is more than that.
Web Data Extraction Usages
Some usage of web data extraction, and web data mining can be
- 1. Generating various management reports
- 2. Product Portfolio: Building a product portfolio based on analysing an existing product portfolio at various ecommerce platforms
- 3. Price Trends, and Competitive Price Monitoring: Analyzing price trends for ecommerce products, airlines (airfares), hotel stay charges (hotel fares), travel information
- 4. Building various travel information
- 5. Most happening information on places, organizations, people, countries, etc
- 6. Lead Generation: Generating Leads from various member directories, organization listings
- 7. Competitor Research: Keeping a watch on competitor (or target person/entity) for their movements, their registrations, memberships, contributions, presence, employees, products, markets, promotions, etc at one or more places
- 8. News and Events: Stay informed about target events, persons, organization like being informed about competitors’ market movement based on their web presence
- 9. Alarms: Staying informed about own (self) for partners, promoters, employees, customers, their engagements and their postings, their behaviour about your company, their mentions about company or your products, their feedback and sentiments about your product and company
- 10. Reviews: To collect various reviews and feedback about product, company, brand and define improvement or corrective strategies based on the information from time to time
- 11. Database: Building a database of financial information of various entities
- 12. Building a pricing sheet by bringing data from various sources, and keeping it up to date
- 13. Research: Studying and building applications for political research, economical research with census, weather information, and so on.
Above list is very small compared to the scope of web data extraction, and number of usage of web data extraction is very high and infinite. It is a sort of a creative / innovative aspect on how to use the same
Innovative Startups and Entrepreneurs using web data extraction
There are various companies built (apart from service companies) on web data extraction and are going successful. No doubt, service companies help building such innovative ventures. DataCrops and ScrapingExpert are one of such service companies who help building and supporting such innovative entrepreneurs and organization going further by deploying professional approach and technical strength for web data extraction along with big data and their machine learning solutions
What after web data extraction – technologies afterwards
Following are cutting edge technologies which can be used for such mined data
- 1. Sentiment Analysis – To analyse sentiment (positive or negative) based on the review and feedbacks given by customers, partners, employees
- 2. Building a Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models based on the data available, and making predictions. i.e. predicting sales volume, employee turnover, etc based on the data. Since the new data will keep coming, the model will continue to learn new cases, and make the model more and more accurate
- 3. Applying Classification to the data and segmenting the target audience
- 4. Applying NLP – identifying organizations, people, locations which will be useful for tracking and generating further data
Author:
Jignesh Parmar
Founder of Datacrops Software Pvt. Ltd.
Email: jignesh@datacrops.com
Published on: 2019-06-21