Data Harvesting: All you need to know
Much similar to harvesting in agriculture, data can be harvested from the social media sites. Data Harvesting is the term that entails extracting and analyzing trends from raw social media. In the modern age of social media platforms and numerous trends, data harvesting has become a source for discerning these trends and extracting them for other purposeful uses .
The extracted trends are somehow found as useful to organizations or companies, in some or the other way. for carrying out social media data harvesting, expert data analysts and automated software programs are required to fiddle through the large amount of raw social media data.
Data harvesting or web scraping is much similar to copying, in which only the required data is copied into a spreadsheet, to conduct analysis. One main element of web scraping is web crawling, when looking through a page for information, the analyst has search the content of that page thoroughly to extract the necessary information.
The process of Data harvesting is confided in three simple tasks.
Firstly, through the knowledge of certain simple tools, data is retrieved and stored locally, in order to be analyzed and extracted later.
Secondly, useful and required data is extracted from the retrieved content pages using much higher and complex tools and is stored in a well structured manner.
Thirdly, integrating data, which basically involves filtering, cleaning and refining the extracted data and structuring the results thereof. the most important aspect of this step is to organize the extracted data to make it easily accessible.
Data harvesting proves to be concern for website publishers as it requires scraping of their data and then using it for other purposes. However, it is known to be a cheap and easy technique for scraping off a large amount of the data.
There are a number of software's that specialize in data harvesting namely, Rapid Miner, Orange, Rattle. Data Melt, Teradata, Board etc.
Apart from loss of a gigantic amount of data and trends, it can also be harmful in certain other ways, it may result in poor SEO ranking, when a large amount of your is duplicated or extracted and then used on other sites it might degrade the SEO ranking and also, your overall performance of the web site. It can also affect the user experience, as well the competitors can take advantage out of this and scrape off some useful information to enhance their own website.
All in all, data harvesting can be considered as both useful and harmful. It may help someone grow their business and at the same time result in losses for another.
