Enterprise Appplication Integration (EAI): Enterprise Application Integration refers to the strategy of making accessible to employees and others within a large organization applications that otherwise are not accessible from a single interface. Enterprise application integration methods combine various isolated applications, such as databases and other information sources or accounting and human resource programs, into a seamlessly accessible portal. Without employing enterprise application integration within an organization, a scenario of inconsistent or repetitious "information islands" exists.

How is screen-scraper used in Enterprise Application Integration?

screen-scraper integrates disparate data systems that normally cannot communicate.

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Enterprise Content Management (ECM): Similar to Enterprise Application Integration, enterprise content management refers to the availability of information and resources to employees or others throughout a corporation's network. The focus of enterprise content management, varying somewhat from enterprise application integration, is the consolidation of enterprise content (web pages, documents, etc.) as opposed to applications.

How is screen-scraper used in Enterprise Content Management applications?

screen-scraper integrates disparate data systems that normally cannot communicate.

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Information collection is similar to web harvesting, except that the term emphasizes the extraction part of harvesting more than the organization of extracted data. Information collection software retrieves information available through the web and stores it so that it can be used for other purposes.

How can screen-scraper be used for information collection?

screen-scraper can be configured to collect information from web sites. For information on how to accomplish, you may read one of the tutorials.

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Unstructured data management refers to the retrieval and processing (rearranging and organizing) of data that doesn't already exist in a formally structured format. For example, although HTML is used to markup data presented through the web so as to make it presentable, it is highly unstructured when compared to a tab delimited text file or a database. Management unstructured data such as an html document can be done by scraping the document and extracting information, which can then be stored in a structured text file, database, or other structured format.

How can screen-scraper assist in managing unstructured data?

screen-scraper can extract data according to patterns discovered on the web site being targeted. screen-scraper can be used to reformat this data to make it more structured or to be used for other purposes.

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Web harvesting refers to the retrieval and processing of data collected from web resources. Web harvesting software tools find, retrieve, and intelligently process unstructured data available via the web. Web harvesting normally involves organizing and structuring the retrieved data after it has been extracted from the web. The term .web harvesting. comes from the notion that, among a large collection of information available, only the required critical information is harvested.

How does screen-scraper perform web harvesting?

screen-scraper scraping sessions can be set up to harvest information from any number of web sites. The software can be configured to sort through the bulk of the information on a site and harvest only the pertinent content.

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