Web Scraper Shortcode WordPress Plugin Review

This short post is on the WP-plugin called Web Scraper Shortcode, that enables one to retrieve a portion of a web page or a whole page and insert it directly into a post. This plugin might be used for getting fresh data or images from web pages for your WordPress driven page without even visiting it. More scraping plugins and sowtware you can find in here.

To install it in WordPress go to Plugins -> Add New.
Usage

The plugin scrapes the page content and applies parameters to this scraped page if specified. To use the plugin just insert the

[web-scraper ]

shortcode into the HTML view of the WordPress page where you want to display the excerpts of a page or the whole page. The parameters are as follows:

    url (self explanatory)
    element – the dom navigation element notation, similar to XPath.
    limit – the maximum number of elements to be scraped and inserted if the element notation points to several of them (like elements of the same class).

The use of the plugin is of the dom (Data Object Model) notation, where consecutive dom nodes are stated like node1.node2; for example: element = ‘div.img’. The specific element scrape goes thru ‘#notation’. Example: if you want to scrape several ‘div’ elements of the class ‘red’ (<div class=’red’>…<div>), you need to specify the element attribute this way: element = ‘div#red’.
How to find DOM notation?

But for inexperienced users, how is it possible to find the dom notation of the desired element(s) from the web page? Web Developer Tools are a handy means for this. I would refer you to this paragraph on how to invoke Web Developer Tools in the browser (Google Chrome) and select a single page element to inspect it. As you select it with the ‘loupe’ tool, on the bottom line you’ll see the blue box with the element’s dom notation:


The plugin content

As one who works with web scraping, I was curious about  the means that the plugin uses for scraping. As I looked at the plugin code, it turned out that the plugin acquires a web page through ‘simple_html_dom‘ class:

    require_once(‘simple_html_dom.php’);
    $html = file_get_html($url);
    then the code performs iterations over the designated elements with the set limit

Pitfalls

    Be careful if you put two or more [web-scraper] shortcodes on your website, since downloading other pages will drastically slow the page load speed. Even if you want only a small element, the PHP engine first loads the whole page and then iterates over its elements.
    You need to remember that many pictures on the web are indicated by shortened URLs. So when such an image gets extracted it might be visible to you in this way: , since the URL is shortened and the plugin does not take note of  its base URL.
    The error “Fatal error: Call to a member function find() on a non-object …” will occur if you put this shortcode in a text-overloaded post.

Summary

I’d recommend using this plugin for short posts to be added with other posts’ elements. The use of this plugin is limited though.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/web-scraper-shortcode-wordpress-plugin-review/

Microsys A1 Website Scraper Review

The A1 scraper by Microsys is a program that is mainly used to scrape websites to extract data in large quantities for later use in webservices. The scraper works to extract text, URLs etc., using multiple Regexes and saving the output into a CSV file. This tool is can be compared with other web harvesting and web scraping services.
How it works
This scraper program works as follows:
Scan mode

    Go to the ScanWebsite tab and enter the site’s URL into the Path subtab.
    Press the ‘Start scan‘ button to cause the crawler to find text, links and other data on this website and cache them.

Important: URLs that you scrape data from have to pass filters defined in both analysis filters and output filters. The defining of those filters can be set at the Analysis filters and Output filters subtabs respectively. They must be set at the website analysis stage (mode).
Extract mode

    Go to the Scraper Options tab
    Enter the Regex(es) into the Regex input area.
    Define the name and path of the output CSV file.
    The scraper automatically finds and extracts the data according to Regex patterns.

The result will be stored in one CSV file for all the given URLs.

There is a need to mention that the set of regular expressions will be run against all the pages scraped.
Some more scraper features

Using the scraper as a website crawler also affords:

    URL filtering.
    Adjustment of the speed of crawling according to service needs rather than server load.

If  you need to extract data from a complex website, just disable Easy mode: out press the  button. A1 Scraper’s full tutorial is available here.
Conclusion

The A1 Scraper is good for mass gathering of URLs, text, etc., with multiple conditions set. However this scraping tool is designed for using only Regex expressions, which can increase the parsing process time greatly.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/microsys-a1-website-scraper-review/

Visual Web Ripper: Using External Input Data Sources

Sometimes it is necessary to use external data sources to provide parameters for the scraping process. For example, you have a database with a bunch of ASINs and you need to scrape all product information for each one of them. As far as Visual Web Ripper is concerned, an input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values.

An input data source is normally used in one of these scenarios:

    To provide a list of input values for a web form
    To provide a list of start URLs
    To provide input values for Fixed Value elements
    To provide input values for scripts

Visual Web Ripper supports the following input data sources:

    SQL Server Database
    MySQL Database
    OleDB Database
    CSV File
    Script (A script can be used to provide data from almost any data source)

To see it in action you can download a sample project that uses an input CSV file with Amazon ASIN codes to generate Amazon start URLs and extract some product data. Place both the project file and the input CSV file in the default Visual Web Ripper project folder (My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects).

For further information please look at the manual topic, explaining how to use an input data source to generate start URLs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/visual-web-ripper-using-external-input-data-sources/

Using External Input Data in Off-the-shelf Web Scrapers

There is a question I’ve wanted to shed some light upon for a long time already: “What if I need to scrape several URL’s based on data in some external database?“.

For example, recently one of our visitors asked a very good question (thanks, Ed):

    “I have a large list of amazon.com asin. I would like to scrape 10 or so fields for each asin. Is there any web scraping software available that can read each asin from a database and form the destination url to be scraped like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{asin} and scrape the data?”

This question impelled me to investigate this matter. I contacted several web scraper developers, and they kindly provided me with detailed answers that allowed me to bring the following summary to your attention:
Visual Web Ripper

An input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values. You can find the additional information here.
Web Content Extractor

You can use the -at”filename” command line option to add new URLs from TXT or CSV file:

    WCExtractor.exe projectfile -at”filename” -s

projectfile: the file name of the project (*.wcepr) to open.
filename – the file name of the CSV or TXT file that contains URLs separated by newlines.
-s – starts the extraction process

You can find some options and examples here.
Mozenda

Since Mozenda is cloud-based, the external data needs to be loaded up into the user’s Mozenda account. That data can then be easily used as part of the data extracting process. You can construct URLs, search for strings that match your inputs, or carry through several data fields from an input collection and add data to it as part of your output. The easiest way to get input data from an external source is to use the API to populate data into a Mozenda collection (in the user’s account). You can also input data in the Mozenda web console by importing a .csv file or importing one through our agent building tool.

Once the data is loaded into the cloud, you simply initiate building a Mozenda web agent and refer to that Data list. By using the Load page action and the variable from the inputs, you can construct a URL like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%asin%.
Helium Scraper

Here is a video showing how to do this with Helium Scraper:

The video shows how to use the input data as URLs and as search terms. There are many other ways you could use this data, way too many to fit in a video. Also, if you know SQL, you could run a query to get the data directly from an external MS Access database like
SELECT * FROM [MyTable] IN "C:\MyDatabase.mdb"

Note that the database needs to be a “.mdb” file.
WebSundew Data Extractor
Basically this allows using input data from external data sources. This may be CSV, Excel file or a Database (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Here you can see how to do this in the case of an external file, but you can do it with a database in a similar way (you just need to write an SQL script that returns the necessary data).
In addition to passing URLs from the external sources you can pass other input parameters as well (input fields, for example).
Screen Scraper

Screen Scraper is really designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases. We have composed a separate article where you can find a tutorial and a sample project about scraping Amazon products based on a list of their ASINs.

Source: http://extract-web-data.com/using-external-input-data-in-off-the-shelf-web-scrapers/

How to scrape Yellow Pages with ScreenScraper Chrome Extension

Recently I was asked to help with the job of scraping company information from the Yellow Pages website using the ScreenScraper Chrome Extension. After working with this

simple scraper, I decided to create a tutorial on how to use this Google Chrome Extension for scraping pages similar to this one. Hopefully, it will be useful to many of you.
1. Install the Chrome Extension

You can get the extension here. After installation you should see a small monitor icon in the top right corner of your Chrome browser.
2. Open the source page

Let’s open the page from which you want to scrape the company information:

3. Determine the parent element (row)

The first thing you need to do for the scraping is to determine which HTML element will be the parent element. A parent element is the smallest HTML element that contains all

the information items you need to scrape (in our case they are Company Name, Company Address and Contact Phone).  To some extent a parent element defines a data row in the

resulting table.

To determine it, open Google Chrome Developer Tools (by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I), click the magnifying class (at the bottom of the window) and select the parent element on the

page. I selected this one:

As soon as you have selected it, look into the developer tools window and you will see the HTML code related to this element:

As is seen from the highlighted HTML line, you can easily define a parent element by its class: listingInfoAndLogo.
5. Determine the information elements (columns)

After you have learned how to determine the parent element, it should be easy to specify the information elements that contain the information you want to scrape (they

represent columns in the resultant table).

Just do this in the same way that you did it for the parent element -  by selecting it on the page:

and looking at the highlighted HTML code below:
As you can see, the company name is defined by businessName class.
6. Tune the ScreenScraper itself

After all the data elements you want to scrape are found, open the ScreenScraper by clicking the small monitor icon in the top-right corner of your browser. Then do the

following:

    Enter the parent element class name (listingInfoAndLogo in our case) into the Selector field, preceding it with a dot (*see below for why)
    Click the Add Column button
    Enter a field’s name (any) into the Field text box
    Enter the information item class into the Selector text box, preceding it with a dot
    Repeat steps 2-4 for each information item element you want to be scraped

*You need to put a dot before the class name because the ScreenScraper requires element definition in CSS Selector format only (with a dot before it)

After you enter all these definitions you should see the preview of the scraped data at the bottom of the extension’s window:

If the result is satisfactory you can download it in JSON or CSV format by pressing the corresponding button.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/how-to-scrape-yellow-pages-with-screenscraper-chrome-extension/

A simple way to turn a website into JSON

Recently, while surfing the web I stumbled upon an simple web scraping service named Web Scrape Master. It is a kind of RESTful web service that extracts data from a specified web site and returns it to you in JSON format.
How it works

Though I don’t know what this service may be useful for, I still like its simplicity: all you need to do is to make an HTTP GET request, passing all necessary parameters in the query string:
http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url={url}&xpath={xpath}&attr={attr}&callback={callback}

    url  - the URL of the website you want to scrape
    xpath – xpath determining the data you need to extract
    attr - attribute the name you need to get the value of (optional)
    callback - JSON callback function (optional)

For example, for the following request to our testing ground:

http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url=http://testing-ground.extract-web-data.com/blocks&xpath=//div[@id=case1]/div[1]/span[1]/div

You will get the following response:

[{"text":"<div class='name'>Dell Latitude D610-1.73 Laptop Wireless Computer</div>","attrs":{"class":"name"}}]
Visual Web Scraper

Also, this service offers a special visual tool for building such requests. All you need to do is to enter the URL of the website and click to the element you need to scrape:
Visual Web Scraper
Conclusion

Though I understand that the developer of this service is attempting to create a simple web scraping service, it is still hard to imagine where it can be useful. The task that the service does can be easily accomplished by means of any language.

Probably if you already have software receiving JSON from the web, and you want to feed it with data from some website, then you may find this service useful. The other possible application is to hide your IP when you do web scraping. If you have other ideas, it would be great if you shared them with us.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/a-simple-way-to-turn-a-website-into-json/

Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.



A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

Data Mining As a Process

The data mining process is also known as knowledge discovery. It can be defined as the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and then summarizing the data into useful information in order to improve the revenue and cut the costs. The process enables categorization of data and the summary of the relationships is identified. When viewed in technical terms, the process can be defined as finding correlations or patterns in large relational databases. In this article, we look at how data mining works its innovations, the needed technological infrastructures and the tools such as phone validation.

Data mining is a relatively new term used in the data collection field. The process is very old but has evolved over the time. Companies have been able to use computers to shift over the large amounts of data for many years. The process has been used widely by the marketing firms in conducting market research. Through analysis, it is possible to define the regularity of customers shopping. How the items are bought. It is also possible to collect information needed for the establishment of revenue increase platform. Nowadays, what aides the process is the affordable and easy disk storage, computer processing power and applications developed.

Data extraction is commonly used by the companies that are after maintaining a stronger customer focus no matter where they are engaged. Most companies are engaged in retail, marketing, finance or communication. Through this process, it is possible to determine the different relationships between the varying factors. The varying factors include staffing, product positioning, pricing, social demographics, and market competition.

A data-mining program can be used. It is important note that the data mining applications vary in types. Some of the types include machine learning, statistical, and neural networks. The program is interested in any of the following four types of relationships: clusters (in this case the data is grouped in relation to the consumer preferences or logical relationships), classes (in this the data is stored and finds its use in the location of data in the per-determined groups), sequential patterns (in this case the data is used to estimate the behavioral patterns and patterns), and associations (data is used to identify associations).

In knowledge discovery, there are different levels of data analysis and they include genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, nearest neighbor method, data visualization, decision trees, and rule induction. The level of analysis used depends on the data that is visualized and the output needed.

Nowadays, data extraction programs are readily available in different sizes from PC platforms, mainframe, and client/server. In the enterprise-wide uses, size ranges from the 10 GB to more than 11 TB. It is important to note that two crucial technological drivers are needed and are query complexity and, database size. When more data is needed to be processed and maintained, then a more powerful system is needed that can handle complex and greater queries.

With the emergence of professional data mining companies, the costs associated with process such as web data extraction, web scraping, web crawling and web data mining have greatly being made affordable.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-As-a-Process&id=7181033

Web Data Extraction Services

Web Data Extraction from Dynamic Pages includes some of the services that may be acquired through outsourcing. It is possible to siphon information from proven websites through the use of Data Scrapping software. The information is applicable in many areas in business. It is possible to get such solutions as data collection, screen scrapping, email extractor and Web Data Mining services among others from companies providing websites such as Scrappingexpert.com.

Data mining is common as far as outsourcing business is concerned. Many companies are outsource data mining services and companies dealing with these services can earn a lot of money, especially in the growing business regarding outsourcing and general internet business. With web data extraction, you will pull data in a structured organized format. The source of the information will even be from an unstructured or semi-structured source.

In addition, it is possible to pull data which has originally been presented in a variety of formats including PDF, HTML, and test among others. The web data extraction service therefore, provides a diversity regarding the source of information. Large scale organizations have used data extraction services where they get large amounts of data on a daily basis. It is possible for you to get high accuracy of information in an efficient manner and it is also affordable.

Web data extraction services are important when it comes to collection of data and web-based information on the internet. Data collection services are very important as far as consumer research is concerned. Research is turning out to be a very vital thing among companies today. There is need for companies to adopt various strategies that will lead to fast means of data extraction, efficient extraction of data, as well as use of organized formats and flexibility.

In addition, people will prefer software that provides flexibility as far as application is concerned. In addition, there is software that can be customized according to the needs of customers, and these will play an important role in fulfilling diverse customer needs. Companies selling the particular software therefore, need to provide such features that provide excellent customer experience.

It is possible for companies to extract emails and other communications from certain sources as far as they are valid email messages. This will be done without incurring any duplicates. You will extract emails and messages from a variety of formats for the web pages, including HTML files, text files and other formats. It is possible to carry these services in a fast reliable and in an optimal output and hence, the software providing such capability is in high demand. It can help businesses and companies quickly search contacts for the people to be sent email messages.

It is also possible to use software to sort large amount of data and extract information, in an activity termed as data mining. This way, the company will realize reduced costs and saving of time and increasing return on investment. In this practice, the company will carry out Meta data extraction, scanning data, and others as well.

please visit Data extraction services to take care of your online as well as offline projects and to get your work done in given time frame with exceptional quality.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services&id=4733722

Outsource Your Work To Data Entry Services To Convert Your Paperwork To An Electronic Format

Among the many services that are outsourced, data entry services are much in demand. While the job profile might seem simple it does in fact require a certain degree of exactness and an eye for detail. Maintaining and handling the client confidentiality is also very important. Data needs to be processed and the first step is always entering the information in the system. An operator needs to be careful while entering information in the system as often this data is used to collate data and for statistical reports and is also the foundation for all the information on the company. These services include much more than just basic information in this technology driven age. An operator today has projects that require Image entry, card Entry, legal document's entry, medical claim entry, entry for online survey forms, online indexing, copying, pasting and sorting of data etc.

A Data entry operator is competent at handling online as well as offline data and even to excel. Specialized services like Image editing, image clipping and cropping services are also available with this service. BPO companies offer these services at very cost effective rates and the work is processed 24x7 ensuring that the work is constantly auctioned. Many data sensitive projects are also completed even in a 24 hour. There are many online services to choose from and each specializes in various features with ample industry experience. These services use the latest technology to ensure that paperwork is processed in the shorted possible time and is converted into electronic data that is easier to store.

A professional service must be able to offer the following features like data conversion and even storage, effective management of databases and an adherence to turnaround times, 100% accuracy of the data entered, 24x7 webs and phone support, a secure and accurate data capture, data extraction and data processing and importantly a cost effective solution for quality data services. A professional company will also ensure that there is a Quality Assurance department monitoring the quality of the work being handled with relevant feedback to both the client and to the operator.

Before deciding on outsourcing your work to a data entry service ensures that the company is known for its reliability and quality. A company that offers data backup is also a good option as it will take care of all the paperwork while forwarding the converted electronic data back. This paperwork could be extracted in the case of a claim or any legal requirement. There are many BPO companies online advertising their services, browse through their features and find one that suits your requirements.

The writer is a Data entry service provider who specializes as data entry operator. Inquire for a free quote for data entry services. If you want services as data entry operators or data entry for your organizations. We are able to provide data entry services at affordable low cost.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsource-Your-Work-To-Data-Entry-Services-To-Convert-Your-Paperwork-To-An-Electronic-Format&id=7270797

Text Data Mining Can Be Profitable

There are billions of search terms performed on the internet every year,and the companies which make use of this vast amount of information are the ones who will be able to market effectively in the future. It is here that text data mining comes into its own, a technique which enables researchers to find patterns within groups of text which will enable them to make predictions as to how customers or other groups of people will act in the future. This article will take a look at text data mining and how we can help various groups of people to find the best things in the data analysis.

It is always a good idea to do some study of the text mining techniques before going on to text mining implementation, and this can be said to be especially true of the insurance industry where not only text mining but also generic data mining using in statistics can be a great help in determining profitability and also showing actuaries how to make future calculations.

Consultancy is an important part of text data mining, and the text mining consultant can bring a huge amount of knowledge to a company whatever the service or services that are providing, particularly if he has an extensive knowledge of text data mining technology and can help to build a system around it.

Of course it is not only commercial applications that can use text mining, because it also has used in security, in that it can help to track criminal intent on the Internet. There are also applications in the biomedical world, in order to help find clusters of data in the right way. But it is in the online world and in the field of marketing that text mining is being used extensively, particularly in customer relationship management [CRM] techniques, where the tools are among some of the most advanced.

Knowing how text mining algorithms work is essential for any consultant who works in this field, because it is an important tool in the marketing technique possibilities. By understanding how text data mining can help an organization a consultant or marketer can make great strides in profitability and this is something that most organizations would be glad for.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Text-Data-Mining-Can-Be-Profitable&id=2314536

The Increasing Significance of Data Entry Services

The instantaneous business environment has become extremely competitive in the new era of globalization. Huge business behemoths that had been benefited from monopolistic luxuries are now being challenged by newer participant in the marketplace, forcing recognized players to reorganize their plans and strategies. These are some of the major reasons that seemed to have forced businesses to opt for outsourcing services such as data entry services that allow them to focus on their core business processes. This in turn makes it simple for them to attain and maintain business competencies, a prerequisite for effectively overcoming the rising competitive challenges.

So, how exactly is data entry helping businesses in achieving their targeted goals and objectives? Well, to be able to know actually that, we will first have to delve deeper into the field of data entry and allied activities. To start with, it would be worth mentioning that every business, big and small, generates voluminous amounts of data and information that is important from a business point of view. This is exactly where the problems start to surface because accessing, analyzing and processing such voluminous amounts of data is too time consuming and obviously a task that can easily be classified as non-productive. And these are exactly the reasons for outsourcing such non-core work processes to third party outsourcing firms.

There is many data entry outsourcing firms and most of them are located in developing countries such as India. There are many reasons for such regional clustering, but the most prominent reason it seems is that India has a vast talent pool, comprising of educated, English-speaking professionals. The best part is that it is relatively less expensive to hire the services of these professionals. The same level of expertise will have been a lot more expensive to hire if it had been in a developed country. Subsequently, more and more businesses worldwide are outsourcing their non-core work processes.

As Globalization intensifies even more in the coming years, businesses will face even greater amounts of competitive pressures and it will just not be possible for them to even think about managing everything on their own, let alone actually going ahead and doing it. However, that should not be a problem, especially for businesses that opt for outsourcing services such as data entry and data conversion. By hiring such high-end and cost-effective services, these businesses will be able to realize the associated benefits that will come mostly as significant cost reductions, optimum accuracy, and increased efficiencies.

So for business executives that think outsourcing data entry related processes can help to achieve your targeted business goals and objectives, it's time you contacted an offshore outsourcing provider and request them precisely how they can ease your business. However just make sure that you opt for the most excellent available data entry services provider, perceptibly because it will be like sharing a part of your business.

Data Entry Services - PDF Conversion - Data Conversion. Data Entry Services for the most accurate handling and storage of critical data.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Increasing-Significance-of-Data-Entry-Services&id=1125870

Offline Data Mining Strikes Gold

You'll often hear the term "striking gold" associated with data mining. Just as gold miners received information about a patch of land and went in with their shovels hoping to strike it rich, data mining deals in relatively the same way. The process is being popular for businesses of various types, and if done right it can be an extremely low-risk, high-reward process.

Basically, data mining is the process of discovering and analyzing data from different perspectives. The process of getting information and facts from usable sources. Once data is compiled and analyzed, it is then summarized into useful information for a business. The result, hopefully, will help to cut overhead costs, increase revenue and be an all-around tool for business improvement. It can be used to improve and generate business strategies that will help you and your business as well.

In a sense, you can think of data mining like election polling. With a strong sample group of voters, proper analysis can paint a picture of who's going to win the election. If you'll notice, however, there's a catch in this process. A person (statistic) would have to be present within a field in order to give a result i.e. a voter would need to be polled instead of a random person.

Anything quantifiable is data. It is a factual information used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation. It is most basically anything and everything under the sun. You can deal with facts, numbers, text, people, and even statistics on shopping habits. Just about a bit of everything.

Businesses are pressing the limits of what data is, using operational data like cost, inventory, payroll, accounting and sales; non-operational data like forecast data, macro economic data and industry sales; and even meta-data, which is, essentially, data about the collected data.

Any collected information can then be quantified to knowledge, and trends can be discovered and predicted. The goal is to mine the data, analyze it and come up with hard data about consumer buying behaviors, employee behavior, geographical significance, and a number of other usable statistics to help your business grow.

Not every business is employing this process on the same scale. While some do collect the data in various forms and use it to their advantage, only the companies serious about data mining actually invest in the processing power and build data warehouses where trends are stored and all data is centralized.

For more information on how to grown your business online and how to use effective internet marketing, please visit us at http://www.ladyluckmedia.co.uk



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Offline-Data-Mining-Strikes-Gold&id=6266733

Can You Automate The Creation of Website Content?

Everybody knows that you need good quality content for your website. If you want the search engines to find your website you need to have unique content. In recent times many lazy webmasters have tried to fool engines by just scraping content from existing sites - or random fragments of other people's articles. Others prefer the use of entire articles from free article directories to fill their sites. Many times you see sites that are solely made up of articles by other people - poorly organized - some of them partly rewritten. While this may attract search engines there are two main problems:

1. The duplicate content penalty - this means that the engines in most cases will detect duplicate copies of content and devaluate most of them.
2. The user experience. If a user comes to your site - which is what you want I suppose - they are presented with a collection of random articles but cannot see anything of unique value.

The first point is obvious. Experts have indicated recently that around 60% of duplicate content is detected by the search engine algorithms. The one that would count for a search will be the one with the highest page rank - no matter if it has been there first or not. This means a copy may rank well while the original gets devalued. Search engines don't care who wrote something first. The only thing they care about is relevance.

The second point is a little harder to understand for most people. A poor user experience may result in users to never come back to your site. Some webmasters don't even care about their visitors. But think a moment: What is a visitor? Think of your own home. How do you treat a visitor? If somebody comes to visit you - would you offer reused or rotten food - or a warm beer? I am sure you won't. So now think of your website as some extension of your home and your personality. People want to see, read and feel a certain personal touch when visiting your site. If your site reads and feels like all others they'll be gone in an instance.

The problem with using automated tools to artificially generate masses of content is that you produce zombies without a soul. And people can sense that when reading.

Now this does not mean that you cannot use smart software to assist you in producing great content or modifying existing one. In fact all journalists use tools like thesauruses and others. They have to produce articles all the time under tremendous pressure with little or no time.
The crucial thing is that you need to have something to start with, a good idea, a great concept - a core 20% and then you may use software to assist you.

Ever tried the synonyms feature in your word processor? (Just right-click on a word and select synonyms). Now this is a very simple approach. You don't make a text unique just by replacing words. Just go a check any article you find on the web using copyscape. They find even slightly modified content all over. You'll soon find that there are not many really unique articles on the web. Almost anything has already been reused in one way or the other. Is that bad? No, as long as you keep the user in mind who will hopefully read your article.

The best strategy is to write your own content - because it has your unique voice in it. Then use software tools such as website content wizard to support you by applying a phrase based thesaurus - replacing blocks of generic phrases and so on. This is the point: software should support - not replace your creativity.

So while software can be of great help in generating good unique content for your website, always keep in mind the reader who will have to eat what you prepared. Before you press any submit or upload button, always ask yourself: Would I want to read what I just produced?

Software such as Website Content Wizard can support authors in producing unique quality content: Go to Website Content Wizard [http://www.website-contentwizard.com] to see a free video demonstration this authoring tool.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Can-You-Automate-The-Creation-of-Website-Content?&id=291780

Recover Data With Secure Data Recovery Services

Failure of hard disk drive, server, or RAID array can lead to loss of data stored in the computer and also stop ongoing work. Both these aspects can be extremely detrimental to the interests of the computer user, whether an individual or a business entity.

It is essential that at such a stage data recovery process is set in motion immediately to maximize the possibility of recovering the entire lost data and to make the computer operational. The first step would be to contact a reputable online services provider such as Secure Data Recovery Services. They have a network of it's locations throughout the United States.

Essential Attributes Of Data Recovery Services

If data recovery is of prime importance to you, choose the online recovery services that specialize in all types of them. These include hard drive, RAID recovery, Mac, SQL, and Tape recovery. You must ensure that the data one selected by you should be able to extract vital and critical data from any interface hard disk drive. For example, IDE, EIDE, SATA "Serial ATA," PATA "Parallel ATA," SCSI, SAS, and Fiber Channel. The data one should also be able to recover data from single drive, multiple-drive, and RAID array setups. They should also be able to service all major brand drives.

The most important attribute of Secure Data Recovery Services is that they have qualified, experienced, and professional technicians. They should be able to diagnose the cause of the failure and set it right. These technicians are trained to work continuously till the time a solution to your problem is found. The service also has all modern tools and instruments. The work is carried out in Clean Rooms so that no dust particle can enter the hard drive. All these services are provided to the full satisfaction of the clients and at competitive prices.

Loss of data can be a nightmare. Secure Data Recovery Services have the technical know how, experienced and qualified technicians, necessary tools, Clean Room, and the will to complete the recovery work as quickly as possible.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Recover-Data-With-Secure-Data-Recovery-Services&id=5301563

Proactive Approach For Improved Data Quality In Data Warehousing

Ever since data warehousing is being used as a facilitator for strategic decision making, the importance of the quality of the underlying data has grown many folds. Data quality issues are much like the software quality issues. They both can sabotage the project at any stage.

This being my first article ever, is more of a loud thinking than a definitive set of steps. In subsequent articles I will discuss data quality issues more in depth.

1. Data collection process:

Many organizations depend on the ETL tools available in the market to make their transactional data ready for OLAP. These tools would be much more effective if the data coming from the day to day used systems is having valid contents. So the data quality checks should be applied right from the data collection process.

For example we see that in case of feedback collection where users write ad-hoc feedback for the open ended questions. To ensure valid feedbacks are registered, techniques ranging from parsing feedback text for some keywords to complex text mining algorithms are employed. More efficient techniques of data quality checking will offload data quality burden from subsequent stages of the DW projects.

According to me there are many separate aspects of looking at data collection. One way to look at it is implicit data collection and explicit data collection. For example, data collected at the server, proxy or client level for tracking user's browsing behavior will have to be treated separately while preparing it for mining in comparison to data collected through data entry forms.

However proactively taken steps to ensure that valid content gets into the databases would be useful in either case (e.g. In explicit form, it could be string pattern matching tasks like validating the email addresses pattern using which we may not allow the form to be submitted or in case of implicit data collection we need to distinguish between actual user clicks and a bot or a scraping program clicking links on your web pages automatically).

2. Data cleansing process.

Data cleansing is a difficult process due to sheer size of the source data. It is not easy to pick out the badly behaving data from a collection of few terabytes of data. The techniques used here are many ranging from fuzzy matching, custom de-duplication algorithms, and script based custom transforms.

The best approach is studying the source data model and building basic rules for the checking of data quality. This can also be done iteratively. In many cases clients do not provide data upfront but data model only with trial data. The BA and domain expert can with mutual consultation come up with certain rules as to how the actual data should be. These rules may not be very detailed but that is OK as this is just a first iteration. As the understanding of the source data model evolves, so can the data quality rules. (This might sound almost heavenly to anyone who has been a part even a single data warehousing project but it is an approach worth trying.)

Please note that this is different from data profling tools which run on source data. We are trying to analyze metadata and the project requirements so as to specify the data quality.

Generally building this rule requires the sound knowledge of the industry concerned and also the consistent and in-sync data dictionary but the worse part is once these rules are built; data modeling team also has to carry out the actual data verification against these rules manually. This process being cumbersome and error prone might compromise on data quality. We will discuss more about how can this be reduced and possibly automated in the next article.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Proactive-Approach-For-Improved-Data-Quality-In-Data-Warehousing&id=829164

Outsource Data Mining Services to Offshore Data Entry Company

Companies in India offer complete solution services for all type of data mining services.

Data Mining Services and Web research services offered, help businesses get critical information for their analysis and marketing campaigns. As this process requires professionals with good knowledge in internet research or online research, customers can take advantage of outsourcing their Data Mining, Data extraction and Data Collection services to utilize resources at a very competitive price.

In the time of recession every company is very careful about cost. So companies are now trying to find ways to cut down cost and outsourcing is good option for reducing cost. It is essential for each size of business from small size to large size organization. Data entry is most famous work among all outsourcing work. To meet high quality and precise data entry demands most corporate firms prefer to outsource data entry services to offshore countries like India.

In India there are number of companies which offer high quality data entry work at cheapest rate. Outsourcing data mining work is the crucial requirement of all rapidly growing Companies who want to focus on their core areas and want to control their cost.

Why outsource your data entry requirements?

Easy and fast communication: Flexibility in communication method is provided where they will be ready to talk with you at your convenient time, as per demand of work dedicated resource or whole team will be assigned to drive the project.

Quality with high level of Accuracy: Experienced companies handling a variety of data-entry projects develop whole new type of quality process for maintaining best quality at work.

Turn Around Time: Capability to deliver fast turnaround time as per project requirements to meet up your project deadline, dedicated staff(s) can work 24/7 with high level of accuracy.

Affordable Rate: Services provided at affordable rates in the industry. For minimizing cost, customization of each and every aspect of the system is undertaken for efficiently handling work.

Outsourcing Service Providers are outsourcing companies providing business process outsourcing services specializing in data mining services and data entry services. Team of highly skilled and efficient people, with a singular focus on data processing, data mining and data entry outsourcing services catering to data entry projects of a varied nature and type.

Why outsource data mining services?

360 degree Data Processing Operations
Free Pilots Before You Hire
Years of Data Entry and Processing Experience
Domain Expertise in Multiple Industries
Best Outsourcing Prices in Industry
Highly Scalable Business Infrastructure
24X7 Round The Clock Services

The expertise management and teams have delivered millions of processed data and records to customers from USA, Canada, UK and other European Countries and Australia.

Outsourcing companies specialize in data entry operations and guarantee highest quality & on time delivery at the least expensive prices.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsource-Data-Mining-Services-to-Offshore-Data-Entry-Company&id=4027029

Basics of Online Web Research, Web Mining & Data Extraction Services

The evolution of the World Wide Web and Search engines has brought the abundant and ever growing pile of data and information on our finger tips. It has now become a popular and important resource for doing information research and analysis.

Today, Web research services are becoming more and more complicated. It involves various factors such as business intelligence and web interaction to deliver desired results.

Web Researchers can retrieve web data using search engines (keyword queries) or browsing specific web resources. However, these methods are not effective. Keyword search gives a large chunk of irrelevant data. Since each webpage contains several outbound links it is difficult to extract data by browsing too.

Web mining is classified into web content mining, web usage mining and web structure mining. Content mining focuses on the search and retrieval of information from web. Usage mining extract and analyzes user behavior. Structure mining deals with the structure of hyperlinks.

Web mining services can be divided into three subtasks:

Information Retrieval (IR): The purpose of this subtask is to automatically find all relevant information and filter out irrelevant ones. It uses various Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc and other resources to find the required information.

Generalization: The goal of this subtask is to explore users' interest using data extraction methods such as clustering and association rules. Since web data are dynamic and inaccurate, it is difficult to apply traditional data mining techniques directly on the raw data.

Data Validation (DV): It tries to uncover knowledge from the data provided by former tasks. Researcher can test various models, simulate them and finally validate given web information for consistency.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Basics-of-Online-Web-Research,-Web-Mining-and-Data-Extraction-Services&id=4511101

An Easy Way For Data Extraction

There are so many data scraping tools are available in internet. With these tools you can you download large amount of data without any stress. From the past decade, the internet revolution has made the entire world as an information center. You can obtain any type of information from the internet. However, if you want any particular information on one task, you need search more websites. If you are interested in download all the information from the websites, you need to copy the information and pate in your documents. It seems a little bit hectic work for everyone. With these scraping tools, you can save your time, money and it reduces manual work.

The Web data extraction tool will extract the data from the HTML pages of the different websites and compares the data. Every day, there are so many websites are hosting in internet. It is not possible to see all the websites in a single day. With these data mining tool, you are able to view all the web pages in internet. If you are using a wide range of applications, these scraping tools are very much useful to you.

The data extraction software tool is used to compare the structured data in internet. There are so many search engines in internet will help you to find a website on a particular issue. The data in different sites is appears in different styles. This scraping expert will help you to compare the date in different site and structures the data for records.

And the web crawler software tool is used to index the web pages in the internet; it will move the data from internet to your hard disk. With this work, you can browse the internet much faster when connected. And the important use of this tool is if you are trying to download the data from internet in off peak hours. It will take a lot of time to download. However, with this tool you can download any data from internet at fast rate.There is another tool for business person is called email extractor. With this toll, you can easily target the customers email addresses. You can send advertisement for your product to the targeted customers at any time. This the best tool to find the database of the customers.

However, there are some more scraping tolls are available in internet. And also some of esteemed websites are providing the information about these tools. You download these tools by paying a nominal amount.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?An-Easy-Way-For-Data-Extraction&id=3517104

Data Conversion Services

Data conversion services have a unique place in this internet driven, fast-growing business world. Whatever be the field - educational, health, legal, research or any other - data conversion services play a crucial role in building and maintaining the records, directories and databases of a system. With this service, firms can convert their files and databases from one format or media to another.

Data conversion services help firms to convert their valuable data and information stored and accumulated in papers into digital format for long-term storage - for the purpose of archiving, easy searching, accessing and sharing.

Now there are many big and small highly competent business process outsourcing (BPO) companies providing a full range of reliable and trustworthy data conversion services to the clients worldwide. Most of these BPO firms are fully equipped with excellent infrastructural facilities and skilled manpower to provide data conversion services catering to the clients' expectations and specifications. These firms can effectively play an important role in improving a company's document/data lifecycle management. With the application of high speed scanners and data processors, these firms can expertly and accurately convert any voluminous and complex data into digital formats, all within the specified time and budget. Moreover, they use state-of-the-art encryption techniques to ensure privacy and security of data transmission over the Internet. The following are the important services offered by the companies in this area:

o Document scanning and conversion
o File format conversion
o XML conversion
o SGML conversion
o CAD conversion
o OCR clean up, ICR, OMR
o Image Conversion
o Book conversion
o HTML conversion
o PDF conversion
o Extracting data from catalog
o Catalog conversion
o Indexing
o Scanning from hard copies, microfilms, microfiche, aperture cards, and large-scale drawings

Thus, by entrusting a data conversion project to an expert outsourcing company, firms can enjoy numerous advantages in terms of quality, efficiency and cost. Some of its key benefits are:

o Avoids paper work
o Cuts down operating expenses and excessive staffing
o Helps to rely on core business activities
o Promotes business as effectively as possible
o Systemizes company's data in simpler format
o Eliminates data redundancy
o Easy accessibility of data at any time

If you are planning to outsource your data conversion work, then you must choose the provider carefully in order to reap the fullest benefits of the services.

Data conversion experts at Managed Outsource Solutions (MOS) provides full conversion services of paper, microfilm, aperture cards, and large-scale drawings, through scanning, indexing, OCR, quality control and export of the archive and books to electronic formats or the final imaging solution. MOS is a US company providing managed outsource solutions that are focused on several industries, including medical, legal, information technology and media.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Conversion-Services&id=1523382

Digging Up Dollars With Data Mining - An Executive's Guide

Introduction

Traditionally, organizations use data tactically - to manage operations. For a competitive edge, strong organizations use data strategically - to expand the business, to improve profitability, to reduce costs, and to market more effectively. Data mining (DM) creates information assets that an organization can leverage to achieve these strategic objectives.

In this article, we address some of the key questions executives have about data mining. These include:

    What is data mining?
    What can it do for my organization?
    How can my organization get started?

Business Definition of Data Mining

Data mining is a new component in an enterprise's decision support system (DSS) architecture. It complements and interlocks with other DSS capabilities such as query and reporting, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), data visualization, and traditional statistical analysis. These other DSS technologies are generally retrospective. They provide reports, tables, and graphs of what happened in the past. A user who knows what she's looking for can answer specific questions like: "How many new accounts were opened in the Midwest region last quarter," "Which stores had the largest change in revenues compared to the same month last year," or "Did we meet our goal of a ten-percent increase in holiday sales?"

We define data mining as "the data-driven discovery and modeling of hidden patterns in large volumes of data." Data mining differs from the retrospective technologies above because it produces models - models that capture and represent the hidden patterns in the data. With it, a user can discover patterns and build models automatically, without knowing exactly what she's looking for. The models are both descriptive and prospective. They address why things happened and what is likely to happen next. A user can pose "what-if" questions to a data-mining model that can not be queried directly from the database or warehouse. Examples include: "What is the expected lifetime value of every customer account," "Which customers are likely to open a money market account," or "Will this customer cancel our service if we introduce fees?"

The information technologies associated with DM are neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, and rule induction. It is outside the scope of this article to elaborate on all of these technologies. Instead, we will focus on business needs and how data mining solutions for these needs can translate into dollars.

Mapping Business Needs to Solutions and Profits

What can data mining do for your organization? In the introduction, we described several strategic opportunities for an organization to use data for advantage: business expansion, profitability, cost reduction, and sales and marketing. Let's consider these opportunities very concretely through several examples where companies successfully applied DM.

Expanding your business: Keystone Financial of Williamsport, PA, wanted to expand their customer base and attract new accounts through a LoanCheck offer. To initiate a loan, a recipient just had to go to a Keystone branch and cash the LoanCheck. Keystone introduced the $5000 LoanCheck by mailing a promotion to existing customers.

The Keystone database tracks about 300 characteristics for each customer. These characteristics include whether the person had already opened loans in the past two years, the number of active credit cards, the balance levels on those cards, and finally whether or not they responded to the $5000 LoanCheck offer. Keystone used data mining to sift through the 300 customer characteristics, find the most significant ones, and build a model of response to the LoanCheck offer. Then, they applied the model to a list of 400,000 prospects obtained from a credit bureau.

By selectively mailing to the best-rated prospects determined by the DM model, Keystone generated $1.6M in additional net income from 12,000 new customers.

Reducing costs: Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield is New York State's largest health insurer. To compete with other healthcare companies, Empire must provide quality service and minimize costs. Attacking costs in the form of fraud and abuse is a cornerstone of Empire's strategy, and it requires considerable investigative skill as well as sophisticated information technology.

The latter includes a data mining application that profiles each physician in the Empire network based on patient claim records in their database. From the profile, the application detects subtle deviations in physician behavior relative to her/his peer group. These deviations are reported to fraud investigators as a "suspicion index." A physician who performs a high number of procedures per visit, charges 40% more per patient, or sees many patients on the weekend would be flagged immediately from the suspicion index score.

What has this DM effort returned to Empire? In the first three years, they realized fraud-and-abuse savings of $29M, $36M, and $39M respectively.

Improving sales effectiveness and profitability: Pharmaceutical sales representatives have a broad assortment of tools for promoting products to physicians. These tools include clinical literature, product samples, dinner meetings, teleconferences, golf outings, and more. Knowing which promotions will be most effective with which doctors is extremely valuable since wrong decisions can cost the company hundreds of dollars for the sales call and even more in lost revenue.

The reps for a large pharmaceutical company collectively make tens of thousands of sales calls. One drug maker linked six months of promotional activity with corresponding sales figures in a database, which they then used to build a predictive model for each doctor. The data-mining models revealed, for instance, that among six different promotional alternatives, only two had a significant impact on the prescribing behavior of physicians. Using all the knowledge embedded in the data-mining models, the promotional mix for each doctor was customized to maximize ROI.

Although this new program was rolled out just recently, early responses indicate that the drug maker will exceed the $1.4M sales increase originally projected. Given that this increase is generated with no new promotional spending, profits are expected to increase by a similar amount.

Looking back at this set of examples, we must ask, "Why was data mining necessary?" For Keystone, response to the loan offer did not exist in the new credit bureau database of 400,000 potential customers. The model predicted the response given the other available customer characteristics. For Empire, the suspicion index quantified the differences between physician practices and peer (model) behavior. Appropriate physician behavior was a multi-variable aggregate produced by data mining - once again, not available in the database. For the drug maker, the promotion and sales databases contained the historical record of activity. An automated data mining method was necessary to model each doctor and determine the best combination of promotions to increase future sales.

Getting Started

In each case presented above, data mining yielded significant benefits to the business. Some were top-line results that increased revenues or expanded the customer base. Others were bottom-line improvements resulting from cost-savings and enhanced productivity. The natural next question is, "How can my organization get started and begin to realize the competitive advantages of DM?"

In our experience, pilot projects are the most successful vehicles for introducing data mining. A pilot project is a short, well-planned effort to bring DM into an organization. Good pilot projects focus on one very specific business need, and they involve business users up front and throughout the project. The duration of a typical pilot project is one to three months, and it generally requires 4 to 10 people part-time.

The role of the executive in such pilot projects is two-pronged. At the outset, the executive participates in setting the strategic goals and objectives for the project. During the project and prior to roll out, the executive takes part by supervising the measurement and evaluation of results. Lack of executive sponsorship and failure to involve business users are two primary reasons DM initiatives stall or fall short.

In reading this article, perhaps you've developed a vision and want to proceed - to address a pressing business problem by sponsoring a data mining pilot project. Twisting the old adage, we say "just because you should doesn't mean you can." Be aware that a capability assessment needs to be an integral component of a DM pilot project. The assessment takes a critical look at data and data access, personnel and their skills, equipment, and software. Organizations typically underestimate the impact of data mining (and information technology in general) on their people, their processes, and their corporate culture. The pilot project provides a relatively high-reward, low-cost, and low-risk opportunity to quantify the potential impact of DM.

Another stumbling block for an organization is deciding to defer any data mining activity until a data warehouse is built. Our experience indicates that, oftentimes, DM could and should come first. The purpose of the data warehouse is to provide users the opportunity to study customer and market behavior both retrospectively and prospectively. A data mining pilot project can provide important insight into the fields and aggregates that need to be designed into the warehouse to make it really valuable. Further, the cost savings or revenue generation provided by DM can provide bootstrap funding for a data warehouse or related initiatives.

Recapping, in this article we addressed the key questions executives have about data mining - what it is, what the benefits are, and how to get started. Armed with this knowledge, begin with a pilot project. From there, you can continue building the data mining capability in your organization; to expand your business, improve profitability, reduce costs, and market your products more effectively.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Digging-Up-Dollars-With-Data-Mining---An-Executives-Guide&id=6052872

PDF Scraping - Make Your Files Easily Accessible

What do you mean by PDF Scraping?

PDF Scraping refers to the process of mechanically sorting of information. This information is displayed on the Internet on PDF file and other such documents. The main purpose of this process is to assimilate the desired information into spreadsheets and databases. This process retrieves information from the PDF files and it is done with the help of various tools. It does not violate copyright laws. It retrieves information or contents from the files displayed on the World Wide Web.

Why does most of the information displayed on Internet in PDF format?

Many entrepreneurs are exhibiting their company information on their website in the form of PDF files. These PDF files are secure and portable in nature. A user can have access to this format on any type of system with different configuration. These files are also secure as they have less chances of getting infected from computer virus. The format of PDF files also remains intact on viewing the document. Due to the advantages of PDF document many entrepreneurs display their information on PDF files.

How to use the process of PDF Scraping?

There are various ways to retrieve vital information from the PDF files. PDF Scraping is one of such effective techniques. Information can be saved in PDF format either in the form of text or image. You can use many tools to extract information from such files. The textual information can be retrieved from Adobe's own computer program. You can deploy special tools to extract information from the PDF image files. After the tool finishes scraping the document a user can scan the document searching for desired information. You can then select the information that you want and save it any database or any other file. There are many tools available that can personalize the information that you select. These tools can save the selected data the way you desire. To make the documents in PDF document, use Word to PDF converter software.

What is the importance of PDF Scraping?

The process of PDF Scraping saves plenty of time and energy of a user in collecting vital information from PDF files on the Internet. It reduces the workload of a computer user. This process enables you to concentrate on creating documents like newsletters, contracts, invoices and much more. You can create numerous types of documents easily and swiftly.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?PDF-Scraping---Make-Your-Files-Easily-Accessible&id=3211584

Preference to Offshore Document Data Entry Services

A number or business organizations if different industries are seeking competent and precise document data entry services to maintain their business records safe for future references. Document data entry has advanced as a quickly developing and active industry structure almost accept in all major companies of the world. The companies doing businesses these days are undergoing rapid changes and therefore the need for services is becoming all the more crucial.

To get success you need to accomplish more understanding about the market, your business, clients as well as the prevailing factors that influence your business. A considerable amount of document is in one or the other way included in this entire process. These services is helpful in taking crucial decisions for the organization. It also provides you a standard in understanding the current and future business status of your company.

In this information age data-entry from documents and data conversion have become important elements for most business houses. The requirement for document services has reached zenith since companies work on processes like business merger and acquisitions, as well as new technology developments. In such scenarios having access to the right kind of data at the right time is very crucial and that is why companies opt for reliable services.

These services covers a range of professional business oriented activities such as document plus image processing to image editing as well as catalog processing. A few noteworthy examples of from documents include: PDF document indexing, insurance claim entry, online data capture as well as creating new databases. These services are important in industries like insurance companies, banks, government departments and airlines.

Companies such as Offshore and outsource and others offer an entire gamut of first rate data services. Actually, getting services from documents offshore to developing yet competent countries like India has made the process highly economical plus quality driven too.

Business giants around the world have realized multiple advantages associated in Offshore-Data-Entry. Companies not only prosper because of quality services but are also benefited because of better turn around time, maintaining confidentiality of data as well as economic rates.

Though the company works in all form of documents, there are few below mentioned areas where it specializes:

• Document data entry
• Document data entry conversion
• Document data processing
• Document data capture services
• Web data extraction
• Document scanning indexing

Since reputable companies like Offshore Data-Entry hire only well qualified and trained candidates work satisfaction is guaranteed. There are several steps involved in the quality check (QC) process and therefore accuracy level is maintained to 99.995% ensuring that the end result is delivered to the client far beyond his expectation.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Preference-to-Offshore-Document-Data-Entry-Services&id=5570327

How Can We Ensure the Accuracy of Data Mining - While Anonymizing the Data?

Okay so, the topic of this question is meaningful and was recently asked in a government publication on Internet Privacy, Smart Phone Personal Data, and Social Online Network Security Features. And indeed, it is a good question, in that we need the bulk raw data for many things such as; planning for IT backbone infrastructure, allotting communication frequencies, tracking flu pandemics, chasing cancer clusters, and for national security, etc, on-and-on, this data is very important.

Still, the question remains; "How Can We Ensure the Accuracy of Data Mining - While Anonymizing the Data?" Well, if you don't collect any data in the first place, you know what you've collected is accurate right? No data collected = No errors! But, that's not exactly what everyone has in mind of course. Now then if you don't have sources for the data points, and if all the data is a anonymized in advance, due to the use of screen names in social networks, then none of the accuracy of any of the data can be taken as truthful.

Okay, but that doesn't mean some of the data isn't correct right? And if you know the percentage of data you cannot trust, you can get better results. How about an example, during the campaign of Barak Obama there were numerous polls in the media, of course, many of the online polls showed a larger percentage, land-slide-like, which never materialized in the actual election; why? Simple, there were folks gaming the system, and because the online crowd, younger group participating was in greater abundance.

Back to the topic; perhaps what's needed is for someone less qualified as a trusted source with their information could be sidelined and identified as a question mark and within or adding to the margin of error. And, if it appears to be fake, a number next to that piece of data, and that identification can then be deleted, when doing the data mining.

Although, perhaps a subsystem could allow for tracing and tracking, but only if it was at the national security level, which could take the information all the way down to the individual ISP and actual user identification. And if data was found to be false, it could merely be red flagged, as unreliable.

The reality is you can't trust sources online, or any of the information that you see online, just like you cannot trust word-for-word the information in the newspapers, or the fact that 95% of all intelligence gathered is junk, the trick is to sift through and find the 5% that is reality based, and realize that even the misinformation, often has clues.

Thus, if the questionable data is flagged prior to anonymizing the data, then you can increase your margin for error without ever having the actual identification of any one-piece of data in the whole bulk of the database or data mine. Margins for error are often cut short, to purport better accuracy, usually to the detriment of the information or the conclusions, solutions, or decisions made from that data.

And then there is the fudge factor, when you are collecting data to prove yourself right? Okay, let's talk about that shall we? You really can't trust data as unbiased if the dissemination, collection, processing, and accounting was done by a human being. Likewise, we also know we cannot trust government data, or projections.

Consider if you will the problems with trusting the OMB numbers and economic data on the financial bill, or the cost of the ObamaCare healthcare bill. Also other economic data has been known to be false, and even the bank stress tests in China, the EU, and the United States is questionable. For instance consumer and investor confidence is very important therefore false data is often put out, or real data is manipulated before it's put on the public. Hey, I am not an anti-government guy, and I realize we need the bureaucracy for some things, but I am wise enough to realize that humans run the government, and there is a lot of power involved, humans like to retain and get more of that power. We can expect that.

And we can expect that folks purporting information under fake screen names, pen names to also be less-than-trustworthy, that's all I am saying here. Look, it's not just the government, corporations do it too as they attempt to put a good spin on their quarterly earnings, balance sheet, move assets around, or give forward looking projections.

Even when we look at the data from the FED's Beige Sheet we could say that most all of that is hearsay, because generally the FED Governors of the various districts do not indicate exactly which of their clients, customers, or friends in industry gave them which pieces of information. Thus we don't know what we can trust, and we thus must assume we can't trust any of it, unless we can identify the source prior to its inclusion in the research, report, or mined data query.

This is nothing new, it's the same for all information, whether we read it in the newspaper or our intelligence industry learns of new details. Check sources and if we don't check the sources in advance, the correct thing to do is to increase the probability that the information is indeed incorrect, and/or the margin for error at some point ends up going hyperbolic on you, thus, you need to throw the whole thing out, but then I ask why collect it in the first place.

Ah hell, this is all just philosophy on the accuracy of data mining. Grab yourself a cup of coffee, think about it and email your comments and questions.




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Has It Been Done Before? Optimize Your Patent Search Using Patent Scraping Technology

Since the US patent office opened in 1790, inventors across the United States have been submitting all sorts of great products and half-baked ideas to their database. Nowadays, many individuals get ideas for great products only to have the patent office do a patent search and tell them that their ideas have already been patented by someone else! Herin lies a question: How do I perform a patent search to find out if my invention has already been patented before I invest time and money into developing it?

The US patent office patent search database is available to anyone with internet access.

US Patent Search Homepage

Performing a patent search with the patent searching tools on the US Patent office webpage can prove to be a very time consuming process. For example, patent searching the database for "dog" and "food" yields 5745 patent search results. The straight-forward approach to investigating the patent search results for your particular idea is to go through all 5745 results one at a time looking for yours. Get some munchies and settle in, this could take a while! The patent search database sorts results by patent number instead of relevancy. This means that if your idea was recently patented, you will find it near the top but if it wasn't, you could be searching for quite a while. Also, most patent search results have images associated with them. Downloading and displaying these images over the internet can be very time consuming depending on you internet connection and the availability of the patent search database servers.

Because patent searches take such a long time, many companies and organizations are looking ways to improve the process. Some organizations and companies will hire employees for the sole purpose of performing patent searches for them. Others contract out the job to small business that specialize in patent searches. The latest technology for performing patent searches is called patent scraping.

Patent scraping is the process of writing computer automated scripts that analyze a website and copy only the content you are interested in into easily accessible databases or spreadsheets on your computer. Because it is a computerized script performing the patent search, you don't need a separate employee to get the data, you can let it run the patent scraping while you perform other important tasks! Patent scraping technology can also extract text content from images. By saving the images and textual content to your computer, you can then very efficiently search them for content and relevancy; thus saving you lots of time that could be better spent actually inventing something!

To put a real-world face on this, let us consider the pharmaceutical industry. Many different companies are competing for the patent on the next big drug. It has become an indispensible tactic of the industry for one company to perform patent searches for what patents the other companies are applying for, thus learning in which direction the research and development team of the other company is taking them. Using this information, the company can then choose to either pursue that direction heavily, or spin off in a different direction. It would quickly become very costly to maintain a team of researchers dedicated to only performing patent searches all day. Patent scraping technology is the means for figuring out what ideas and technologies are coming about before they make headline news. It is by utilizing patent scraping technology that the large companies stay up to date on the latest trends in technology.

While some companies choose to hire their own programming team to do their patent scraping scripts for them, it is much more cost effective to contract out the job to a qualified team of programmers dedicated to performing such services.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Has-It-Been-Done-Before?-Optimize-Your-Patent-Search-Using-Patent-Scraping-Technology&id=171000

Data Management Services

In recent studies it has been revealed that any business activity has astonishing huge volumes of data, hence the ideas has to be organized well and can be easily gotten when need arises. Timely and accurate solutions are important in facilitating efficiency in any business activity. With the emerging professional outsourcing and data organizing companies nowadays many services are offered that matches the various kinds of managing the data collected and various business activities. This article looks at some of the benefits that accrue of offered by the professional data mining companies.

Entering of data

These kinds of services are quite significant since they help in converting the data that is needed in high ideal and format that is digitized. In internet some of this data can found that is original and handwritten. In printed paper documents and or text are not likely to contain electronic or needed formats. The best example in this context is books that need to be converted to e-books. In insurance companies they also depend on this process in processing the claims of insurance and at the same time apply to the law firms that offer support to analyze and process legal documents.

EDC

That is referred to as electronic data. This method is mostly used by clinical researchers and other related organization in medical. The electronic data and capture methods are used in the utilization in managing trials and research. The data mining and data management services are given in upcoming databases for studies. The ideas contained can easily be captured, other services being done and the survey taken.

Data changing

This is the process of converting data found in one format to another. Data extraction process often involves mining data from an existing system, formatting it, cleansing it and can be installed to enhance both availability and retrieving of information easily. Extensive testing and application are the requirements of this process. The service offered by data mining companies includes SGML conversion, XML conversion, CAD conversion, HTML conversion, image conversion.

Managing data service

In this service it involves the conversion of documents. It is where one character of a text may need to be converted to another. If we take an example it is easy to change image, video or audio file formats to other applications of the software that can be played or displayed. In indexing and scanning is where the services are mostly offered.

Data extraction and cleansing

Significant information and sequences from huge databases and websites extraction firms use this kind of service. The data harvested is supposed to be in a productive way and should be cleansed to increase the quality. Both manual and automated data cleansing services are offered by data mining organizations. This helps to ensure that there is accuracy, completeness and integrity of data. Also we keep in mind that data mining is never enough.

Web scraping, data extraction services, web extraction, imaging, catalog conversion, web data mining and others are the other management services offered by data mining organization. If your business organization needs such services here is one that can be of great significance that is web scraping and data mining



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Management-Services&id=7131758