Content Curation World

To capture and extract structured data from any web site is one of the approaches adopted to gather more information on a specific topic when there are no easier means to access that data or to export it easily from the site where it was published.

Web scraping, web mining, data extraction and website scraping include a wide range of applications and uses and nonetheless some malicious use of them, these technologies are very useful for data curation, business intelligence, SEO optimization and to monitor content changes on any web page.

Web scrapers are generally geek tools that require some familiarity with how data is structured inside a database and within a HTML /CSS web page. To scrape information from a web page it is in fact necessary to be able to identify key elements of the data to be extracted in order to teach the scraper what patterns to follow to reliably extract the data you need.

If you are looking for more information on commercial web scrapers available online, their key strenghts, prices and features, the two lists that follow contain everything you may want to know and more.

Included are also WordPress plugins capable of scraping work, a tool to prevent your own web pages from being "scraped" by others, and some coverage of the ethical and legal issues involved.

Very useful. Geeky tools. 8/10

Software for web scraping: http://extract-web-data.com/software-for-web-scraping/

Scraping software, services and plugins sum up: http://extract-web-data.com/scraping-software-services-and-plugins-sum-up/