Ducky : A Data Extraction System for Various Structured Web Documents

The World Wide Web has become a primary source of information. Therefore, extracting data from Web sources has become a key technology. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic system Ducky : including a Web Wrapper which extracts data from Web sources and translates them into structured data. In Ducky, by defining a configuration file consisting in several parameters (URL of the Web page, CSS selectors which locates the data to retrieve and so on.), users do not need to write Web scraping programs at all. The definition is simple, yet can extract data flexibly from various structured Web pages. Additionally, Ducky provides a Web API and various output data formats: XML, JSON, CSV. Finally, experimentations confirmed that Ducky can accurately extract data from 22 different structured Web sources.