Data Extraction and some tools use for Data Extraction

* Data Extraction

Data extraction is the act or process of retrieving data out of (usually unstructured or poorly structured) data sources for further data processing or data storage (data migration). The import into the intermediate extracting system is thus usually followed by data transformation and possibly the addition of metadata prior to export to another stage in the data workflow.

Typical unstructured data sources include web pages, emails, documents, PDFs, scanned text, mainframe reports, spool files, classifieds, etc.Extracting data from these unstructured sources has grown into a considerable technical challenge where as historically data extraction has had to deal with changes in physical hardware formats, the majority of current data extraction deals with extracting data from these unstructured data sources, and from different software formats. This growing process of data extraction[3] from the web is referred to as Web scraping.


* Data Extraction Tools:-

There are a no.of Data Extracction tools available nowadays.
Some of them are:-
- Winautomation
- Octoparse
- Health Data Achiever
- Diggernaut
- Salestools.io
- import.io
- ABBYY FlexiCapture
- Data Integration
- Connotate
- Datahub, etc.


* httracks

HTTrack is a free and easy-to-use offline browser utility.
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.
WinHTTrack is the Windows (from Windows 2000 to Windows 10 and above) release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release.


* Maltego

Maltego is proprietary software used for open-source intelligence and forensics, developed by Paterva. Maltego focuses on providing a library of transforms for discovery of data from open sources, and visualizing that information in a graph format, suitable for link analysis and data mining.
Maltego permits creating custom entities, allowing it to represent any type of information in addition to the basic entity types which are part of the software. The basic focus of the application is analyzing real-world relationships between people, groups, websites, domains, networks, internet infrastructure, and affiliations with online services such as Twitter and Facebook.