Web Scraping – Ethical Data Collection Activity or an Illegal Practice?

Abiding by the definition, web scrapping is a method to extract data from website. There can be different reasons to perform this task, such as for reporting, market research, to determine share indexes, know website updates, product rate updates, to monitor data, and so on. Besides these, data theft is another of the prominent motives behind web data extraction, which ultimately holds the use of a web scraper as unethical and at times, illegal.

Technical definition

In technical terms, data scraping is a method of collecting data from a website through specific software. These software programs or web scrapers give the website owners the impression of human web surfing and extract a big volume of data, which is usually difficult for any user visitor to access manually. The apps simulate human exploration of online data by embedding web browsers, or implementing HTTP to fulfill the cause of data extractors.

Relation with data mining

Usually, data mining refers to analyzing data from varied perspectives and transforming it to meaningful information that could help in boosting sales or mitigating financial risks in a business. As for web scraping, it involves extraction of analytical data from the web. At present, web scrapping comprises major source of data extraction carried out by data miners. This is because almost everything is now available online and for any data miner, this resource is no less than a gold mine.

The web scraping process

In this data scraping method, the experts look out for tricks to format the URLs into pages that include the usable information. The web scrapers then parse the DOM tree to extract data from the website. In simple language, the web scrapers process the semi-structured or unstructured data pages of the desired website and then convert the resulting data into a well structured form. The users can harvest or modify the structured data in a better manner.

Web scraping – legal or unethical?

It solely relies on your intentions, whether you are doing this activity in the interest of the masses or just wish to satisfy your personal interests. If it is for a goodwill, such as to research on share index to predict the market situation in the coming days, it is fine. Another positive example could be to identify the trend of market and suggest a client on viable business boosting methods accordingly.

However, if you are doing web scraping for personal gratification then it may well be termed as intrusion into one’s personal data. For example, if you are hacking into the database of a university to steal the academic articles and using them in your own project. Any such instance is definitely an act of stealth and may accompany relevant punishment. Concisely, to get hold of someone’s creative work for individual gains is unethical. Such people also deploy several bots to for data scraping or spinning, which in turn choke the search engine results and hardly useful to the internet.

Considerations that deem web scraping illegal

Generally, web scraping is illegal in two instances:

1. When you violate the terms and conditions of the service of the concerned website:

Most of the data-oriented websites disallow data scraping. Hence, if you are trying to extract data from that website, the owner has all the rights to sue you on the offense of breach of contract.

2. When you publish scraped content:

This is yet another condition that may delve you into violating the right of the copyright holders. If you are only scraping the content for fair use, it may be permissible. However, companies often hold all the publishing rights and may file suit against you if you publish their data without their permission.

Remedy to illegal web scraping

Despite running the apprehensions of getting identified, unethical web scrapers deter to steal data from websites. Hence, the web owners themselves need to be alert enough not to fall prey to such fraudulent activities. Indeed, it is your data and you won’t like it to get compromised at any cost. Just like there are many web scraping tools available online, you can also opt for applications that offer protection against web data extraction as a fruitful remedy. These software safeguard your website content from hacking attacks such as bots, denial of service, brute force, session opening and transaction anomalies, and more.

Summary: Technology has two facets – good and bad. It depends on us which one to adopt; the same holds in the case of web scraping as well. We should make sure to use this innovation for the benefit of society and not to steal away some one’s creativity, which is indeed unethical and at times, illegal

Source : http://www.web-parsing.com/blog/ethical-data-collection-activity-or-an-illegal-practice

Taking a cue from the Ryanair screen scraping judgment

Screen scraping is the best way to aggregate web data much faster than a human possibly can. However, is there any such thing known as ethical web scraping?

Well it’s not scraping in itself that is good or bad. What matters is how you use the scraped data. It would be extremely unethical to steal data, republish it or use it to cause harm to a business. This was clearly established when the EU passed a judgment in favour of Ryanair.

The EU’s highest court passed a judgment in favour of Ryan air, and this will positively prevent people from scraping and using others data in an unethical manner. Ryanair had claimed that PR Aviation scraped its data regarding the flight scheduled and then used it to allow people book Ryanair flights via the PR Aviation website and this is clearly an infringement of database rights.

Source:http://www.habiledata.com/blog/taking-cue-ryanair-screen-scraping-judgment/

Data Scraping - About Hand Scraped Flooring

Hand scraped hardwood flooring is one of the best floors that you can install in your house.

Advantages of Hand Scraped Hardwood Flooring

The product comes with a number of advantages which include:

Antique and modern technology: The floor professionally brings out the best elements of both antique and modern technology. The modern elements are in the quality of the product.

Unique patterns: Who doesn't want to be unique? These floors allow you to create your unique design. If you are going to use a machine, all you need to do is to set the machine such that it creates the pattern that you want. If the floor will be scraped by a craftsman, you should ask the craftsman to craft your desired pattern.

Character: The different depths in the floor provide you with character and color that you can't find in other types of floors. As the sun changes its angle during the day, the nooks and valleys on the board lit differently thus providing your board with an endless rich appearance.

Durability: Experts have been able to show that hand-scraped hardwood retains its look for a long time. If your kid or pet hits the floor, the dent just blends with the rest of the character making it hard for people to tell that there is a dent.

Making the floors shine again

Although, the scraped floors are designed to look worn and aged, they are made from modern wood which needs to be taken care of in order to retain its original look.

To make the floors shine again you need to remove all the dust and dirt that might be causing the wood to look dull.

After doing this you should mix 1 gallon of warm water with ½ teaspoon of dishwashing detergent and use it to clean the surface of the floor. The aim of doing this is to remove any stains that might be on the floor. When you complete doing this you should dampen the piece of cloth with club soda and then use another piece of cloth to buff the wood until it shines.

Conclusion

This is what you need to know about hand scraped hardwood flooring. When cleaning the floors you should avoid using oil based soaps as they dull the surface making your efforts worthless.

If the above method of shining the floor doesn't work, you should mix one part white vinegar and one part of cooking oil and use it to clean the floor.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?About-Hand-Scraped-Flooring&id=8990255

Rvest: easy web scraping with R

Rvest is new package that makes it easy to scrape (or harvest) data from html web pages, by libraries like beautiful soup. It is designed to work with magrittr so that you can express complex operations as elegant pipelines composed of simple, easily understood pieces. Install it with:

install.packages("rvest")

rvest in action

To see rvest in action, imagine we’d like to scrape some information about The Lego Movie from IMDB. We start by downloading and parsing the file with html():

library(rvest)

lego_movie <- html("http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1490017/")

To extract the rating, we start with selectorgadget to figure out which css selector matches the data we want: strong span. (If you haven’t heard of selectorgadget, make sure to read vignette("selectorgadget") – it’s the easiest way to determine which selector extracts the data that you’re interested in.) We use html_node() to find the first node that matches that selector, extract its contents with html_text(), and convert it to numeric with as.numeric():

lego_movie %>%

  html_node("strong span") %>%
  html_text() %>%
  as.numeric()

#> [1] 7.9

We use a similar process to extract the cast, using html_nodes() to find all nodes that match the selector:

lego_movie %>%

  html_nodes("#titleCast .itemprop span") %>%
  html_text()

#>  [1] "Will Arnett"     "Elizabeth Banks" "Craig Berry"   

#>  [4] "Alison Brie"     "David Burrows"   "Anthony Daniels"

#>  [7] "Charlie Day"     "Amanda Farinos"  "Keith Ferguson"

#> [10] "Will Ferrell"    "Will Forte"      "Dave Franco"   

#> [13] "Morgan Freeman"  "Todd Hansen"     "Jonah Hill"

The titles and authors of recent message board postings are stored in a the third table on the page. We can use html_node() and [[ to find it, then coerce it to a data frame with html_table():

lego_movie %>%

  html_nodes("table") %>%
  .[[3]] %>%
  html_table()

#>                                              X 1            NA

#> 1 this movie is very very deep and philosophical   mrdoctor524

#> 2 This got an 8.0 and Wizard of Oz got an 8.1...  marr-justinm

#> 3                         Discouraging Building?       Laestig

#> 4                              LEGO - the plural      neil-476

#> 5                                 Academy Awards   browncoatjw

#> 6                    what was the funniest part? actionjacksin

Other important functions

    If you prefer, you can use xpath selectors instead of css: html_nodes(doc, xpath = "//table//td")).

    Extract the tag names with html_tag(), text with html_text(), a single attribute with html_attr() or all attributes with html_attrs().

    Detect and repair text encoding problems with guess_encoding() and repair_encoding().
    Navigate around a website as if you’re in a browser with html_session(), jump_to(), follow_link(), back(), and forward(). Extract, modify and submit forms with html_form(), set_values() and submit_form(). (This is still a work in progress, so I’d love your feedback.)

To see these functions in action, check out package demos with demo(package = "rvest").

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/rvest-easy-web-scraping-with-r/

Web Scraping : 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

Web Scraping Services - A trending technique in data science!!!

Web scraping as a market segment is trending to be an emerging technique in data science to become an integral part of many businesses – sometimes whole companies are formed based on web scraping. Web scraping and extraction of relevant data gives businesses an insight into market trends, competition, potential customers, business performance etc.  Now question is that “what is actually web scraping and where is it used???” Let us explore web scraping, web data extraction, web mining/data mining or screen scraping in details.

What is Web Scraping?

Web Data Scraping is a great technique of extracting unstructured data from the websites and transforming that data into structured data that can be stored and analyzed in a database. Web Scraping is also known as web data extraction, web data scraping, web harvesting or screen scraping.

What you can see on the web that can be extracted. Extracting targeted information from websites assists you to take effective decisions in your business.

Web scraping is a form of data mining. The overall goal of the web scraping process is to extract information from a websites and transform it into an understandable structure like spreadsheets, database or csv. Data like item pricing, stock pricing, different reports, market pricing, product details, business leads can be gathered via web scraping efforts.

There are countless uses and potential scenarios, either business oriented or non-profit. Public institutions, companies and organizations, entrepreneurs, professionals etc. generate an enormous amount of information/data every day.

Uses of Web Scraping:

The following are some of the uses of web scraping:

•    Collect data from real estate listing

•    Collecting retailer sites data on daily basis

•    Extracting offers and discounts from a website.

•    Scraping job posting.

•    Price monitoring with competitors.

•    Gathering leads from online business directories – directory scraping

•    Keywords research

•    Gathering targeted emails for email marketing – email scraping

•    And many more.

There are various techniques used for data gathering as listed below:

•    Human copy-and-paste – takes lot of time to finish when data is huge

•    Programming the Custom Web Scraper as per the needs.

•    Using Web Scraping Softwares available in market.

Are you in search of web data scraping expert or specialist. Then you are at right place. We are the team of web scraping experts who could easily extract data from website and further structure the unstructured useful data to uncover patterns, and help businesses for decision making that helps in increasing sales, cover a wide customer base and ultimately it leads to business towards growth and success.

We have got expertise in all the web scraping techniques, scraping data from ajax enabled complex websites, bypassing CAPTCHAs, forming anonymous http request etc in providing web scraping services.

The web scraping is legal since the data is publicly and freely available on the Web. Smart WebTech can probably help you to achieve your scraping-based project goals. We would be more than happy to hear from you.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/web-scraping-trending-technique-in-data-science/

Endorsing web scraping

With more than 200 projects delivered, we stand firmly for new challenges every day. We have served above 60 clients and have won 86% of repeat business, as our main core is customer delight. Successive Softwares was approached by a client having a very exclusive set of requirements. For their project they required customised data mining, in real time to offer profitable information to their customers. Requirement stated scrapping of stock exchange data in real time so that end users can be eased in their marketing decisions. This posed as an ambitious task for us because it required processing of huge amount of data on a routine basis. We welcomed it as an event to evolve and do something aside of classic web application development.

We started with mock-ups, pursuing our very first step of IMPART Framework (Innovative Mock-up based Prototypes Analyzed to develop Reengineered Technology). Our team of experts thought of all the potential requirements with a flow and materialized it flawlessly into our mock up. It was a strenuous tasks but our excitement to do something which others still do not think of, filled our team with confidence and energy and things began to roll out perfectly. We presented our mock-up and statistics to the client as per our expectation client choose us, impressed with the efforts.

We started gathering requirements from client side and started to formulate design about the flow. The project required real time monitoring of stock exchange together with Prices, Market Turnover and then implement them into graphs. The front end part was an easy deal, we were already adept in playing with data the way required. The intractable task was to get the data. We researched and found that it can be achieved either with API or with Web Scarping and we moved with latter because of the limitations in API.

Web scraping is a compelling technique to get the required information straight out of the web page. Lack of documentation and not much forbearance forced us to make a slow start, but we kept all the requirements clear and new that we headed in the right direction.  We divided the scraping process into bits of different but related tasks. Firstly we needed to find the data which has to be captured, some of the problems faced were pagination and use of AJAX but with examination of endpoints in URL and the requests made when data is drawn, we surmounted these problems easily.

After targeting our data we focused on HTML parser which could extract data form all the targets. Using PHP we developed a parser extracting all the information and saving them in Database in a structured way.  After the required data present at our end we easily manipulated it into tables and charts and we used HIGHSTOCK for that. Entire Client side was developed in PHP with Zend frame work and we used MySQL 5.7 for server side.

During the whole development cycle our QA team insured we were delivering a quality product following all standards. We kept our client in the loop during the whole process keeping them informed about every step. Clients were also assured as they watched their project starting from scratch which developed into full fledge website. The process followed a strict time line releasing regular builds and implementing new improvements. We stood up to the expectation our client and delivered a product just as they visualized it to be.

Source: http://www.successivesoftwares.com/endorsing-web-scraping/