Web Harvesting

Abstract

Web mining is done on huge amounts of data extracted from WWW. Many researchers have developed several state-of-the-art approaches for web data extraction. So far in the literature, the focus is mainly on the techniques used for data region extraction. Applications which are fed with the extracted data, require fetching data spread across multiple web pages which should be crawled automatically. For this to happen, we need to extract not only data regions, but also the navigation links. Data extraction techniques are designed for specific HTML tags; which questions their universal applicability for carrying out information extraction from differently formatted web pages. This chapter focuses on various web data extraction techniques available for different kinds of data rich pages, classification of web data extraction techniques and comparison of those techniques across many useful dimensions.