Dapper – The Data Mapper – Extract and Use Website Information
Dapper – The Data Mapper – Extract and Use Website Information
http://www.dapper.net
Dapper is a US company with offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Founded by Eran Shir and Jon Aizen in late 2005, Dapper aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website. By doing so, they hope to allow others to realize their creativity and implement new and exciting services and applications. Dapper’s mission is to allow you to use any web based content in any way you can imagine. And by use, they mean going beyond just reading or viewing a webpage. You may want to create an RSS feed or a Google Gadget for a site, take a site’s content and put it on a map, receive an email alert when your site’s Alexa’s ranking goes below 5000, or create a mashup of your favorite band’s tour dates and a camping locations reservation website to organize your musical camping vacation. Whatever you want to do, however you want to mold the web, Dapper can help you do it. How do we go about filling such a tall order? Well, basically, Dapper allows you to easily build an API for any website. Initially, if the content source you’re interested in is not Dapped already, Dapper will take you through a visual and intuitive process that takes just minutes. When finished, you will have at your disposal an API with which you can interface to get the content you are interested in. Imagine you want to build a service that gets movie theaters details in your zip code. All you have to do is dapp Yahoo Theaters, and voila, you have a web service API for Yahoo theaters, which can be accessed with any zip code and returns the relevant data in a format of your choice (XML, HTML, RSS, Google Map, etc.). Using Dapper, any web page becomes a LEGO block, which you can arrange and manipulate in any way you like. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. This has been added to World Wide Web Reference Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. This will be added to Web Data Extractors – White Paper Link Compilation.