Extract the data you need from Internet!

Imagine you have found a really interesting website with information that you need for your project.
However, that website does not provide a data feed or it is not in a well-structured format for automatic processing. How will you extract the data?

This is the case of the CIA World Factbook website, a great public dataset of countries with information such as population, area and number of mobile phones. The data in the website is in a semi-structured form in a way that you cannot import it into MsExcel or mysql database. Importing this database would allow you to make queries such as "show me the list of countries with a GPD per capita greater than $20.000 and more than 50 million cell phones", or apply statistics and data-mining techniques. See here how this dataset looks like once imported.

Extracting databases from websites is extremely useful for:

* creating smart applications
* trends and business analysis
* monitoring business competitors
* direct marketing
* getting datasets for scientific experiments

In this workshop we will explain how to extract data from this type of websites.
We will first review existing and related technologies (Dapper, Web-Harvest, OpenKapow, Yahoo Pipes...)
and then introduce our open-source web information extraction toolkit.
Target audience: software developers.

For a higher-level picture, and to discuss the legal aspects of extracting and using data from websites,
you may want to attend this other workshop.

Contact: Charles François Rey <charlesfr.rey@db4all.com>
DB4ALL.com

PS: If you have questions, comments or suggestions about this workshop, do not hesitate to contact us prior to the workshop.