What a wonderful tool dapper is. This is apparently web 3.0, the webs new phase of maturity that will blossom eventually to the semantic web. It’s all about re-using open data from large and famous sites in a more structured and intelligent context. Here is a good but old article on such:
Web 3.0: When Websites Become Web Services
Dapper allows any webmaster to perform very basic web scraping, which will be familiar process to those who enjoy studying search engines or even Metlib. Dapper qua. Web scraping simply selects, collects and re-formats html content from a site, rendering it re-usable for different purposes. This is great for databases: I can now see a quick way of transferring data from the exam papers website into a PHP MySQL. This will open it up from departments to use the data in their own applications. Also, it could be a great starting point for stripping our old website for the forthcoming CMS migration. I strongly advise everyone to investigate this and come up with some ideas on how we might use it.
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