Demystified Overview of Data Scraping
Shehu Mustapha, Mustafa B. Man, Wan Aezwani Wan Abu Bakar, Mohd Kamir Yusof, Ily Amalina Ahmad Sabri · International journal of data science and advanced analytics. · 2024
Data scraping is a concept that involves the extraction of relevant data from a pool of information stored in a computer. Data scraping is universally known as web scraping because the web contains massive amount of information that is easily accessible and extracted. Web scraping is valuable to all field of human endeavour. The paper gives a vivid conceptualization of data scraping and some minor misconception between data mining, web crawling and web scraping. Furthermore, the phases and procedure of data scraping were outlined. The merit of web scraping over API scraping were explicated. Moreover, the numerous software and tools that support the scraping of websites were stated. Even though web scraping has vast prominence, there are also some technical issues and challenges associated with it. Finally, some of the legal and ethical issues related to information extraction were discussed and it is obvious that data scraping is permitted as long as users comply to the terms and conditions of the target site.