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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2511–2512Cite as

Screen Scraper

  • Reference work entry

  • 188 Accesses

Synonyms

Screen scraping; Data extraction; Screen wrapper

Definition

A screen scraper is a program which extracts relevant data from the visual user interface of an application. Input data are commonly represented using text-only or graphically enhanced tables, lists and forms, tailored to a human audience. Scraping is the task of collecting data from its presentation, not directly from its source for lack of access. The scraper output has a structured and machine-readable format, where extracted data are usually annotated with its semantics (metadata), suitable for automatic post-processing. The process can be thought of as reverse-engineering a data store from its presentation, abstracting content from layout. Using this approach, application data are taken from the human-oriented screen output rather than the application’s hidden proprietary data structures.

Key Points

Traditionally, screen scrapers have been used to interface legacy systems residing on old mainframes, which often...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Hassan T. and Baumgartner R. Intelligent text extraction from PDF documents. In Proc. Int. Conf. on Intelligent Agents, Web Technologies and Internet Commerce, 2005, pp. 2–6.

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  2. Huynh D., Mazzocchi S., and Karger D. Piggy bank: experience the semantic web inside your web browser. In the Fourth Int. Semantic Web Conf., 2005.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Harald Naumann

Authors
  1. Harald Naumann
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Naumann, H. (2009). Screen Scraper. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1167

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