Version 13 (modified by 15 years ago) ( diff ) | ,
---|
Integrating/Developing a framework to extract structured data from web sources with a simple query language.
The Spreadsheet Importer will be a component of this. But it would also be good to be able to import from the following formats:
- HTML (File/URL)
- DOC
- XML (Not matching out data schema)
- RSS
- News feeds
- Ushahidi
- Incoming SMS
Some of these formats will be able to be parsed and imported, others may be unstructured and saved as a "New Feed".
Some of the data may be tabular, or just single record.
A generic importing tool, which allowed data to be imported from various sources automatically. The data could be parsed and fitted into our data model, or it may just be added to a news feed aggregator. This project could include:
- A User friendly interface to match fields to parse the data
- Importing from "flat" tables to linked tables
- Methods of automatically (or with a user friendly interface) cleaning data (removing duplicate values with variations due to typos) - for example:
- If there were a list of countries which contained Indonesia, Spain, India, Indonesiasia, New Zealand, NZ, France, UK, Indonsia - the import may be able to identify whcih fields were duplicates, rather than adding 2 incorrect spellings for Indonesia.
Ideally different templates will be able to be designed (by users) for importing different types of data. Machine learning algorithms with (multiple?) human verification could try parsing new data formats based on previous templates used.
Some links that might be useful:
- http://wiki.github.com/fizx/parsley/
- http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/guide/
- PDFminer is a tool to convert pdf docs into text, it is open source (Licence).
- Code snippet to extract hyperlinks from HTML docs.
import sgmllib class MyParser(sgmllib.SGMLParser): def parse(self, s): self.feed(s) self.close() def __init__(self, verbose=0): sgmllib.SGMLParser.__init__(self, verbose) self.hyperlinks = [] def start_a(self, attributes): for name, value in attributes: if name == "href": self.hyperlinks.append(value) def get_hyperlinks(self): return self.hyperlinks import urllib, sgmllib f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.python.org") s = f.read() myparser = MyParser() myparser.parse(s) print myparser.get_hyperlinks()