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Web Harvesting

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Web data extraction; Web information extraction; Web mining

Definition

Web harvesting describes the process of gathering and integrating data from various heterogeneous web sources. Necessary input is an appropriate knowledge representation of the domain of interest (e.g., an ontology), together with example instances of concepts or relationships (seed knowledge). Output is structured data (e.g., in the form of a relational database) that is gathered from the Web. The term harvesting implies that, while passing over a large body of available information, the process gathers only such information that lies in the domain of interest and is, as such, relevant.

Key Points

The process of web harvesting can be divided into three subsequent tasks: (i) data or information retrieval, which involves finding relevant information on the Web and storing it locally. This task requires tools for searching and navigating the Web, i.e., crawlers and means for interacting with dynamic or deep...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Ciravegna F., Chapman S., Dingli A., and Wilks Y. Learning to harvest information for the Semantic Web. In Proc. 1st European Semantic Web Symposium, 2004, pp. 312–326.

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  2. Crescenzi V. and Mecca G. Automatic information extraction from large websites. J. ACM, 51(5):731–779, 2004.

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  3. Etzioni O., Cafarella M.J., Downey D., Kok S., Popescu A.M., Shaked T., Soderland S., Weld D.S., and Yates A. Web-scale information extraction in KnowItAll: (preliminary results). In Proc. 12th Int. World Wide Web Conference, 2004, pp. 100–110.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Wolfgang Gatterbauer

Authors
  1. Wolfgang Gatterbauer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Gatterbauer, W. (2009). Web Harvesting. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1172

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