Web Data Extraction Solutions for business Automation

Your business today is driven purely and solely by information. This vital component is carved out from data scraped from relevant sources, cleansed and compiled to form the crux of your enterprise analytics plan. Therefore, following a manual practice for Data Extraction often makes it prone to errors which may be detrimental to the health of your business. Various Web Data Extraction Solutions therefore are made available which help to not only automate Website Data Scraping, but in the process also help in the automation of several business processes.  Let us take a look at some of these business processes:

Execute Data Mining

One of the most obvious usages of the data extractor tools is the function of Web Data Mining, which, if done through manual processes is neither cost-effective nor accurate. Therefore, data extraction solutions provide simple and convenient point and click data extraction interfaces. Moreover, these do not require any additional programming knowledge.

Validate Data accuracy

Web Site Data scraping tools use advanced technology to not only extract data, but also validate their accuracy. This is particularly beneficial for businesses which are involved in background screening and credit reporting activities. Automating the process of validating records helps in increasing turnaround time of the business and ensures accuracy, two of the most crucial criteria for achieving success in their line of business.

Be Price Wise

Organizations are always involved in studying the price dynamics in order to better understand the challenges and areas of opportunities. Your awareness on these helps you to provide more competitive pricing for your products and services. Data extraction solutions are equipped with pricing intelligence technology that helps to collect data on the price that your customer’s expect, their feedback on your products and services and helps you develop insights on products being launched by competitors, their price and availability. This automated process therefore ensures the following things for your business:

•    Increased market – share

•    Enhanced product strategy

•    Informed decisions

Be Compliance Ready

If yours is a financial services firm, you must have often found it to be a major challenge to keep yourself abreast of the compliance and risk factors. Tracking the myriad watch lists, sanction lists and federal and state regulations, available on the web is not only time taking but also an expensive endeavor. The automated Web Data Mining tools ensure that you are now able to do this without impacting the time and money aspect of your business. You are now ensured of compliance with all regulations and sanction lists that are updated on a regular basis. Consequently, your business can also breathe easy with a reduced exposure to financial fraud and identity theft.

Easy Access to Customer Feedback

Your customers are in a way the real owners of your business. They define the way you need to design your product strategy. It is therefore crucial that you need to listen to what they have to say.  The automated Web extraction solutions with their ability to tap into several relevant sources help you to get access to customer sentiments and feedback on your products and services. This is a vital aspect in your organization's growth as it helps you to tackle three important factors:

•    Assimilate positive or negative vibes on your newly launched product or service which might require you to revisit your product strategy

•    Provide immediate attention to issues, if any, with any particular product

Create a trend of aggregated customer sentiments, for analysis

Source: http://scraping-solutions.blogspot.in/2014_07_01_archive.html

Web Scraping – Effective Way of Improving Market Presence

Web scraping is a technique that is fast making its presence felt in the world of internet by its sheer weight of being effective. It is a technique that uses software to crawl through the internet and gather up all the relevant and important information that one would need for their products.

The information gathered by the web scraping can be used for various things such as data integration, web mashup, online comparison of price and much more. Web scraping uses sophisticated software that crawls through the internet and gathers up all related information for the entity that you are looking for. The information that is gathered up is an automated, systematic, and very structured way. This allows for easy understanding of the gathered information. Though this is one of the best ways for data extraction there are quite a few things that one must be aware of before getting into web scraping.

Being aware of the following things keep you at a better position not only leverage the best deal, but also to negotiate properly.

•    For data mining the first thing that one should be very sure of is the kind of data they want. One has to define properly what kind of data they want and also what would be the purpose of the same. For an instance if you wish to get a closer look at your competitors, it would be a wise to let the data scraping service providers know who your competitors are. This would allow them to gather better information. Similarly if you are looking for getting new customers getting contact data from existing players in the respective industry would be helpful.

•    One should also be aware of the structure in which they want the data. A simple data structure has the entity name in the row and the property of the entity is kept in the cells of the rows. However, one can also opt for data structure in chart. Apart from the above, there is just one more thing that one needs to keep in mind while using the data mining services; it is the number of data extraction. At times a onetime data extraction would be sufficient whereas at other times periodic extractions or general reports are required.

If you are aware of all the above points, then you are very much inline of going ahead and taking the help of scrape website data. Knowing the above points would allow you to know what exactly to ask from your vendor and likewise quote. One can make the most of the data extraction services with the help of either the web scraping or web crawling services.

Source: https://3idatascraping.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/web-scraping-effective-way-of-improving-market-presence/

Data Mining and Market Research

Online market research attributes to success and growth of many businesses. Online market research in simple terms we can say it is the learning of current and the latest market situations which involve surveys, web and data mining modules. To date research by use of the internet it is very important since it depends on data gathered from internet services and then one can recognize that market research keeps the business successful.

A number of managers in small businesses have a mental deem in that online market research is obligatory to big or larger companies. For true you will understand that whether the businesses is medium, large or small actually need online marketing research and this is a reason why the significance of the process and allegation will approve the targeted and potential clients. In this case Data mining progression is employed to streamline on what targeted and potential clientele needs. Areas where data mining is used:

Preferences. In any given service or product, you will learn what a customer looking for and how your product or service is different from other competitors. By use of Data mining you will be able to determine the customer preferences and you will be able to modify your services and products meet the customer choice.

Buying patterns. What is known and created for purchasing patterns from different customers. A situation can be that customers try to spend a lot on certain products and little on others. But through Data mining it is easy to understand such purchasing patterns and finally plan the appropriate techniques to be used in the marketing.

Prices. To find out whether the company is selling its products to the clients or not prices are the key factors to take into account. One should understand on the right selling price of the products. Web scrapping is easier to find the suitable pricing.

Source: http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/data-mining-market-research/

What are the ethics of web scraping?

Someone recently asked: "Is web scraping an ethical concept?" I believe that web scraping is absolutely an ethical concept. Web scraping (or screen scraping) is a mechanism to have a computer read a website. There is absolutely no technical difference between an automated computer viewing a website and a human-driven computer viewing a website. Furthermore, if done correctly, scraping can provide many benefits to all involved.

There are a bunch of great uses for web scraping. First, services like Instapaper, which allow saving content for reading on the go, use screen scraping to save a copy of the website to your phone. Second, services like Mint.com, an app which tells you where and how you are spending your money, uses screen scraping to access your bank's website (all with your permission). This is useful because banks do not provide many ways for programmers to access your financial data, even if you want them to. By getting access to your data, programmers can provide really interesting visualizations and insight into your spending habits, which can help you save money.

That said, web scraping can veer into unethical territory. This can take the form of reading websites much quicker than a human could, which can cause difficulty for the servers to handle it. This can cause degraded performance in the website. Malicious hackers use this tactic in what’s known as a "Denial of Service" attack.

Another aspect of unethical web scraping comes in what you do with that data. Some people will scrape the contents of a website and post it as their own, in effect stealing this content. This is a big no-no for the same reasons that taking someone else's book and putting your name on it is a bad idea. Intellectual property, copyright and trademark laws still apply on the internet and your legal recourse is much the same. People engaging in web scraping should make every effort to comply with the stated terms of service for a website. Even when in compliance with those terms, you should take special care in ensuring your activity doesn't affect other users of a website.

One of the downsides to screen scraping is it can be a brittle process. Minor changes to the backing website can often leave a scraper completely broken. Herein lies the mechanism for prevention: making changes to the structure of the code of your website can wreak havoc on a screen scraper's ability to extract information. Periodically making changes that are invisible to the user but affect the content of the code being returned is the most effective mechanism to thwart screen scrapers. That said, this is only a set-back. Authors of screen scrapers can always update them and, as there is no technical difference between a computer-backed browser and a human-backed browser, there's no way to 100% prevent access.

Going forward, I expect screen scraping to increase. One of the main reasons for screen scraping is that the underlying website doesn't have a way for programmers to get access to the data they want. As the number of programmers (and the need for programmers) increases over time, so too will the need for data sources. It is unreasonable to expect every company to dedicate the resources to build a programmer-friendly access point. Screen scraping puts the onus of data extraction on the programmer, not the company with the data, which can work out well for all involved.

Source: https://quickleft.com/blog/is-web-scraping-ethical/

The Coal Mining Industry And Investing In It

The History Of Coal Usage

Coal was initially used as a domestic fuel, until the industrial revolution, when coal became an integral part of manufacturing for creating electricity, transportation, heating and molding purposes. The large scale mining aspect of coal was introduced around the 18th century, and Britain was the first nation to successfully use advanced coal mining techniques, which involved underground excavation and mining.

Initially coal was scraped off the surface by different processes like drift and shaft mining. This has been done for centuries, and since the demand was quite low, these mining processes were more than enough to accommodate the demand in the market.

However, when the practical uses of using coal as fuel sparked industrial revolution, the demand for coal rose abruptly, leading to severe shortage of the coal output, gradually paving the way for new ways to extract coal from under the ground.

Coal became a popular fuel for all purposes, even to this day, due to their abundance and their ability to produce more energy per mass than other conventional solid fuels like wood. This was important as far as transportation, creating electricity and manufacturing processes are concerned, which allowed industries to use up less space and increase productivity. The usage of coal started to dwindle once alternate energies such as oil and gas began to be used in almost all processes, however, coal is still a primary fuel source for manufacturing processes to this day.

The Process Of Coal Mining

Extracting coal is a difficult and complex process. Coal is a natural resource, a fossil fuel that is a result of millions of years of decay of plants and living organisms under the ground. Some can be found on the surface, while other coal deposits are found deep underground.

Coal mining or extraction comes broadly in two different processes, surface mining, and deep excavation. The method of excavation depends on a number of different factors, such as the depth of the coal deposit below the ground, geological factors such as soil composition, topography, climate, available local resources, etc.

Surface mining is used to scrape off coal that is available on the surface, or just a few feet underground. This can even include mountains of coal deposit, which is extracted by using explosives and blowing up the mountains, later collecting the fragmented coal and process them.

Deep underground mining makes use of underground tunnels, which is built, or dug through, to reach the center of the coal deposit, from where the coal is dug out and brought to the surface by coal workers. This is perhaps the most dangerous excavation procedure, where the lives of all the miners are constantly at a risk.

Investing In Coal

Investing in coal is a safe bet. There are still large reserves of coal deposits around the world, and due to the popularity, coal will be continued to be used as fuel for manufacturing process. Every piece of investment you make in any sort of industry or a manufacturing process ultimately depends on the amount of output the industry can deliver, which is dependent on the usage of any form of fuel, and in most cases, coal.

One might argue that coal usage leads to pollution and lower standards of hygiene for coal workers. This was arguably true in former years; however, newer coal mining companies are taking steps to assure that the environmental aspects of coal mining and usage are kept minimized, all the while providing better working environment and benefits package for their workers. If you can find a mining company that promises all these, and the one that also works within the law, you can be assured safety for your investments in coal.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Coal-Mining-Industry-And-Investing-In-It&id=5871879