sde


  • Structured Data Extractor (sde) is an implementation of DEPTA (Data Extraction based on Partial Tree Alignment), a method to extract data from web pages (HTML documents). DEPTA was invented by Yanhong Zhai and Bing Liu from University of Illinois at Chicago and was published in their paper: "Structured Data Extraction from the Web based on Partial Tree Alignment" (IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2006). Given a web page, sde will detect data records contained in the web page and extract them into table structure (rows and columns). You can download the application from this link: Download Structured Data Extractor.

    Usage

    1. Extract sde.zip.
    2. Make sure that Java runtime Environment (version 5 or higher) already installed on your computer.
    3. Open command prompt (Windows) or shell (UNIX).
    4. Go to the directory where you extract sde.zip.
    5. Run this command: java -jar sde-runnable.jar URI_input path_to_output_file
    6. You can pass URI_input parameter refering to a local file or remote file, as long as it is a valid URI. URI refering to a local file must be preceded by "file:///". For example in Windows environment: "file:///D:/Development/Proyek/structured_data_extractor/bin/input/input.html" or in UNIX environment: "file:///home/seagate/input/input.html".
    7. The path to output file parameter is formatted as a valid path in the host operating system like "D:\Data\output.html" (Windows) or "/home/seagate/output/output.html" (UNIX).
    8. Extracted data can be viewed in the output file. The output file is a HTML document and the extracted data is presented in HTML tables.

    Source Code

    SDE source code is available at GitHub.

    Dependencies

    SDE was developed using these libraries:

    • Neko HTML Parser by Andy clark and Marc Guillemot. Licensed under Apache License Version 2.0.
    • Xerces by The Apache Software Foundation. Licensed under Apache License Version 2.0.

    License

    SDE is licensed under the MIT license.

    Author

    Sigit Dewanto, sigitdewanto11[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk, 2009.