Online Web Research Services & Data Research, Data mining

Author: Maneet Puri

The World Wide Web is home to millions and trillions of web pages that continue to expand by the second. The web pages contain quality information and resources on extensive genres from across the world. Since Internet came into existence, it has evolved and developed into an international platform that offers tremendous business opportunities to the corporate world. Businesses across the world make use of internet as a powerful alternate sales channel for their proceedings and fuel their advertising, promotions, sales and marketing efforts through it. At present, online businesses are flourishing and recording immense financial growth.

Importance of Data
As the Internet continues to grow and evolve, so is the importance of data mining functions strengthened. Since data is what makes up the internet, it is what decides the success factor online. Data is a crucial aspect of all businesses whatever their prime objectives are. This is because without data, there would be no record of business proceedings and there would be no ground on which to base marketing decisions on. Data provides crucial information about the market and the audience and also tells what would work and what would fail. Quality information fuels successful business decisions and the same time poor data results in unproductive business endeavors.

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Author: Todd Wilson

Probably the most common technique used traditionally to extract data from web pages this is to cook up some regular expressions that match the pieces you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Our screen-scraper software actually started out as an application written in Perl for this very reason. In addition to regular expressions, you might also use some code written in something like Java or Active Server Pages to parse out larger chunks of text. Using raw regular expressions to pull out the data can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, and can get a bit messy when a script contains a lot of them. At the same time, if you're already familiar with regular expressions, and your scraping project is relatively small, they can be a great solution.

Other techniques for getting the data out can get very sophisticated as algorithms that make use of artificial intelligence and such are applied to the page. Some programs will actually analyze the semantic content of an HTML page, then intelligently pull out the pieces that are of interest. Still other approaches deal with developing "ontologies", or hierarchical vocabularies intended to represent the content domain.

There are a number of companies (including our own) that offer commercial applications specifically intended to do screen-scraping. The applications vary quite a bit, but for medium to large-sized projects they're often a good solution. Each one will have its own learning curve, so you should plan on taking time to learn the ins and outs of a new application.

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Author: Will

Government, manufacturing industries, advertising firms, non-governmental organizations conduct data collection just to gather information regarding views, opinions and reactions form the public or the target consumer and use it for various decisions and actions.

Data collection just does not help the companies to launch new products or know about the public reaction to a specific issue, it is a very useful tool for statistical inferences, once the collected data is compiled. The process of data collection is the third step of the six step market research processes. Data collection can be done in two ways involving various technicalities. In this article, we shall give a brief overview of the same.

Data collection can be done in two ways - secondary data and primary data. Secondary data collection involves is the information available in books, journals, previous researches or studies and the Internet. It basically involves making use of the data already present to build or substantiate a concept.

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Shakespeare, what a line and iconic presentation those words have become of human dilemma, the significance of work of literature is beyond doubt a great task.

Some literary works find preservation at time irrelevant owing to the fact that nothing suppresses them and they become a statement of times people lived in.

In modern age, the twenty first century, the preservation of books, literary masterpieces have become a major venture for even the giant corporate such as “Microsoft” and “Google”;

Wikipedia is the currently the worlds largest free data bank of knowledge. It will be surprising to know that Wikipedia as a whole has less than 30 members working on pay and remaining millions of user contributions are edited, monitored and controlled by another whole breed of volunteers contributing towards the knowledge conservation.

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Author: Vinod Singh

Patents are not new, their presence was noted long back during 16th Centaury. In U.S. at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a federal patent power was proposed by James Madison and Charles Pinckney and was adopted without debate as Article 1, Sec. 8, clause 8. The history of Patent Law began all the way back with the Constitution of the United States which was specific about providing protection for those who invent new and unique products. But after the TRIPS, intellectual property rights and patents gained importance to the business communities and industries. The retrieval of the patent information was made easy by internet and access to different patent databases. Patent are the source of the technological innovation and detailed mining of patent literature is proven to be useful of the Completive Intelligence.

This article attempts to analyze importance and methods for the patent data mining and their future use in the competitive intelligence.

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Author: Otilia Otlacan

This article is meant to be a brief review and reminder of some valuable yet often bypassed techniques to collect data on international markets and consumers.

When thinking of market research, surveys are most likely the first technique that comes to ones mind. However, surveys are a quantitative research and, in order to understand customer behavior and the social and cultural context in which our business will operate, we will need to perform some qualitative research as well.

Qualitative methods are most certainly a more appropriate option when in need of researching patterns and attitudes in customer behavior, understand the depth of the environment around the customer, and understand the cultural characteristics then influence a customer – especially when the marketer is not familiar with the country of culture.

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Author: Maneet Puri

Web mining, an extension of data mining implies employing the techniques of data mining to documents on the Internet. Web mining is used to study various aspects of a website and recognize the relationships and patterns in user behavior in order to get an insight into crucial information. For example, if you have to improve the accessibility quotient of your website, you need to know crucial points that need to be improved. Web mining services presents you the required results. It takes into consideration the IP addresses of website visitors, browser logs, cookies and so on.

Web mining tools analyze these logs and process them accordingly to produce meaningful and understandable information. For example, various bits of information can be analyzed to track the browsing route of website visitors. This may assist you in devising ways to make your website more effective.

The whole process of web mining involves extracting information from the internet through traditional practices of data mining and applying it to specific features of the website.

Types of Web Mining

Web mining helps to discover information, find related data and documents, identify patterns and trends and make sure that the web resources remain efficient. There are three main types of web mining:

• Web Content Mining

• Web Usage Mining

• Web Structure Mining

Web Content Mining

This process seeks to discover all the links of hyperlinks within a document in order to generate a structural report on the web page. Information about various facets, for example if users are able to find information, if the website structure is too deep or too shallow, are the web page elements placed correctly, what are the most visited and least visited areas of a website and do they have anything to do with the page design, all these are evaluated and analyzed for further research.

Web Usage Mining

In this process, data mining techniques are applied to discover patterns and trends in the browsing behavior of website visitors. Navigation patters are extracted and so that browsing patters can be deciphered and website structure and designed accordingly. For instance, if there is any particular feature of the website that visitors tend to use very often, you should seek to make it more pronounced and enhanced in order to increase the usability and appeal more to the users. This process makes use of logs and accesses of the web.

By understanding visitor movement and behavior as they surf the internet, you can seek to cater to their needs and preferences better and thus make your website popular among the internet masses.

Web Structure Mining

Web structure mining involves the use of graph theory to analyze the node and connection structure of a website. And as per the nature and type of web structure data, web mining is further divided into two types.

One, extracting patterns from hyperlinks on the internet. A hyperlink is a structural web address that connects the web page to another location. Second kind of web mining is mining the document structure. A tree-like structure is used to analyze and describe the HTML or XHTML tags within the web page.

About the Author:
Maneet Puri is the managing director of LeXolution IT Services, a premier off shore outsourcing company that specializes in providing efficient KPO services. Some of the services provided by the company are Data mining, internet market research and virtual private assistance.


Article Source: Articledashboard