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.