Data Mining vs Screen-Scraping
Posted On Sunday, April 5, 2009 at at 9:53 PM by web researchAuthor: Todd Wilson
Data mining isn’t screen-scraping. I know that some people in the room may disagree with that statement, but they’re actually two almost completely different concepts.
In a nutshell, you might state it this way: screen-scraping allows you to get information, where data mining allows you to analyze information. That’s a pretty big simplification, so I’ll elaborate a bit.
The term "screen-scraping" comes from the old mainframe terminal days where people worked on computers with green and black screens containing only text. Screen-scraping was used to extract characters from the screens so that they could be analyzed. Fast-forwarding to the web world of today, screen-scraping now most commonly refers to extracting information from web sites. That is, computer programs can "crawl" or "spider" through web sites, pulling out data. People often do this to build things like comparison shopping engines, archive web pages, or simply download text to a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered and analyzed.
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