• helvetpuli@sopuli.xyz
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    2 months ago

    So scraping means any harvesting of data now?

    We need a new name for the fairly painful process of trying to tease meaning out of people’s unstructured HTML.

    In any case downloading a bunch of stuff from JSTOR was not scraping. And he absolutely had authorised access to that data. They took exception to the quantity, mainly.

    • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Scraping has multiple meanings.

      Web scraping is a specific type of scraping, but data via APIs or even torrents could be considered a scrape, even if that data is nicely structured.

      The commonality between them is they all have the implication that:

      • the data harvesting is automated
      • the data you harvest is not owned by you, and you don’t have explicit permission to use it
      • the scope of what you harvest is broad and not targeted at retrieving specific limited pieces of data

      Any access patterns that broadly correspond to this could be considered scraping.