Screen Scraping vs Data Mining vs Web Mining

I know the topic got many ‘vs’ but I want to highlight the differences between all of them together. Currently there is a video on YouTube titled “screen scraping, web data mining, web data scraping” and I am calling to clarify the misleading topic. You can watch the video below:

Read my posts about “Data Mining vs Screen-Scraping” and “Data Mining vs Web Mining” to get the whole idea of the topic. I just want to highlight some of the main differences as below:

Screen scraping was used to extract characters from the screens so that they could be analyzed. 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.

Data mining, is defined by Wikipedia as the “practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns.” In other words, you already have the data, and you’re now analyzing it to learn useful things about it. Data mining often involves lots of complex algorithms based on statistical methods. It has nothing to do with how you got the data in the first place. In data mining you only care about analyzing what’s already there.

Web mining, on the other hand, is the application of data mining techniques to discover patterns from the Web. According to analysis targets, web mining can be divided into three different types, which are Web usage mining, Web content mining and Web structure mining.

For More Information about Data Minining click here

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