Why University Should teach Web scraping and Data mining
Web scraping plays an important role in the decision-making process and is frequently used in both private and public sector. Today the data industry is worth nearly $7 Billion, most of it is product analysis, web scraping and data mining. Yet, some experts think that web scraping is still far from reaching its actual potential.
According to a recent research, UK Financial companies (52%) are using automated processes to gather data. Most of the research participants (63%) employ use alternative of web scraping, data mining and Data analysis to gain competitive business inside. Around (42%) of scraping solution clients hire our services to get the data for further analysis, most of them were in e-commerce, real estate, law and brokerage businesses. Even though public sectors and academia are using active utilization of nontraditional data sources but they are still lagging due to lack of skills to gather or scrape the data professionally. With hands on experience on web scraping techniques all of these sectors can do far more than what they are doing currently and for that teaching data gathering skills at collages and Universities are most important than ever before.
Web scraping for science:
Analyzing big data from various resources can help validate existing hypotheses and formulate new ones. In some cases, it provides a broader and less biased perspective than traditional data sources. But if you try to search for information related to web scraping for science you would quickly notice that it mainly concerns data scientists and rarely talks about other fields.
In spite of the lack of awareness of its importance to many, the possibilities of alternative web data analysis in socio-economic and psychological studies are endless for example the bank of Japan has been actively employing alternative data to inform its monetary policy. It uses mobility data and retail trends based on credit card spending to assess economic activity.
Marketing and e-commerce are few sectors where the benefits of web scraping and data mining can be seen. These sectors are heavily relaying on web scraping to collect the competitive price for their customers by analyzing their competitors or by reading the consumers sentiments. Similarly, marketing companies are able to hunt more clients as they have improved their services by the utilization of data analysis, they have better marketing strategy, they can now hit the exact audience they want to sell and they are now able to hunt better products to market.
Apart from all this, web scraping public data has been essential to some studies for machine learning and artificial intelligence. AI and ML are becoming very popular and almost any large university offers AI and ML study-related programs. Students with less or no grip on data gathering tools would always lack proper data sets to apply their algorithms and hence learning web scraping and data mining at colleges and universities is only way out.
The Awareness Issue
Web scraping doesn’t have solution for every scientific field or business niche. Field where experiments are required hardly gets any useful information from internet and if the data is available, it asks a lot of manual effort, which is time consuming.
Popular sources of academic research data are large databases and data sets provided by businesses or government. But the government data is collected slowly, can get outdated, and hardly offers fresh insight. Data provided by private organizations can be helpful but could be biased. Results into a biased or inaccurate outcome.
Countless sources of data on the web provided us ability to do a unique, fresh and unmatched research that would otherwise be impossible. Nevertheless, the advance web scraping might be hard or would require specific skills but today many data gather solution exists which provides very useful data without need to any programming skills.
Hence, it’s not always require by the academics to make their own data scrapers or data parsers but handing over this to third party is some time a better option as they can manage/bypass website protections, Cloudflare, reCAPTCHA and browser finger prints quite professionally. Instead, the academia can put its energies to do better Data Analysis and get the data driven results.
Need of Legal Knowledge
Web scraping has been surrounded by certain legal concerns and researchers often hesitate to take leverage or talk about publicly available data in their scientific work, But most of it is just myths or lack of knowledge about the legalities of web scraping and data mining. Certain countries have given open permission to use the publicly available data without hesitation and USA and one of them.
Yet, There are some scenarios where you would need certain permissions from the owner or organizations if you are using their data for business purposes. Some time websites provide API to provide you better and fast source of data instead of getting it from frontend. So instead of fearing it the best way is to approach a legal practitioner or web scraping consultant before getting into a major or big data mining process.
Conclusion:
Web Scraping has started gaining popularity in the public eye as well as academia. As the volume of Web Data is increasing tremendously every passing year, data Analysis and Data Mining are now becoming essential for Scientific research, business research or market research. Students must normalize their practice with web scraping in their small or medium projects and assignments. However, for big projects, academia must provide the guidance to get consultancy with the legal advisor, facilitating the students is better than putting a full stop to this much needed endeavor.