Is there anyone that has considered how to import data from external
sources, especially those that do not have any prepared an
well-defined API?
A rather simple example from the website for Statistics Norway is an
article on a website like this
http://www.ssb.no/fobstud/
and a table like this
http://www.ssb.no/fobstud/tab-2002-11-21-02.html
In that example you must follow a link to a new page which you then
must monitor for changes. Inside that page you can use Xpath to to
extract a field, and then optionally use something like a regexp to
identify and split fields. As an alternate solution you might use XLT
to transform the whole page.
Anyhow, this can quite easily be formulated both as a parser function
and a tag function.
At the same site there is something called "Statistikkbanken"
(
http://statbank.ssb.no/statistikkbanken/) where you can (must) log on
and then iterate through a sequence of pages.
Similar data as in the previous example can be found in
http://statbank.ssb.no/statistikkbanken/selectvarval/Define.asp?MainTable=F…
But it is very difficult to formulate a kind of click-sequence inside that page.
Any idea? Some kind of click-sequence recording?
Statistics Norway publish statistics about Norway for free reuse as
long as they are credited as appropriate.
http://www.ssb.no/english/help/
John