Collaboration Revolution - Advancing Collaboration for the Future of Work - Blog & Research

import•io is data, simply - capture data from website examine

Written by Brandon Klein | Mar 1, 2013 9:30:57 PM

Find an online source for your data, whether it's a single web page or a search engine within a site. Import•io doesn't discriminate; it works with any web source.
Extract
Identify data

Find the data that you would like to use on the web. Import•io works on a wide variety of sources, including previously hard-to-get deep web sources.
Label

Once you have found the data you want to use, create a structure for it by labelling the data into columns. This is just the same as putting a heading in a column of an Excel spreadsheet.
Extract

Now that you have a structure for the data you can extract it, first by identifying the rows of data— if you give us a few examples our algorithms can identify the rest of it. Once we have the rows, you can show the system how you want to split the data into the columns you created in the previous step.
If you want to use the data once, or infrequently, you can stop here. However, if you would like a live connection to the data or want to be able to access it programatically, the next step will create a real-time connection to the data.
Connect

This stage will allow you to create a real-time connection to the data. First you have to record how you obtained the data you extracted. Second, give us a couple of test cases so we can ensure that, if the website changes, your connection to the data will remain live.
Mix

One of the most powerful features of the platform is the ability to mix data from many sources to form a single data set. This allows you to create incredibly rich data sets by combing hundred of underlying data points from many different websites and access them via the application or API as a single source. Mixing is as easy a clicking the sources you want to mix together and saving that mix as a new real-time data set.