Data Mining and Scraping

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is data mining?

Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information.

It is primarily used by companies with a strong consumer focus. Think about the traditional sense of what mining is all about. It’s about going deep into the center of something to get something valuable out of it. Similarly, you mine data in order to unearth core insights from it. When thinking about mining, consider these questions:  What is in the data? What’s the data telling me? What is the relationship between one data set and another data set?

As previously mentioned, data mining is primarily used by companies with a strong consumer focus - retail, financial, communication, and marketing organizations, for example.

Data mining enables companies to determine relationships among ‘internal’ data indicators such as price, product positioning, or staff skills, and ‘external’ indicators such as economic data, competition, and customer demographics.

What is data scraping?

Data scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts, or ‘scrapes’, data from human-readable output coming from another program.

It’s always worth considering:  HTML content; dynamic websites; XPath and selection techniques; and regular Expressions (a language for extracting small bits of text from a larger text element), before and during data scraping.