"Gather the day," the analogy of plucking data from the web like fruit from a tree.
"Carpe diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace (Odes 1.11). It is popularly translated to 'seize the day'. However, the most appropriate translation, considering the meaning of 'carpe' in the sentence as a whole, is believed to be 'gather the day', as in picking or plucking fruit." (wiki)
Web-data is literally analogous to low-hanging fruit in a few curious ways.
1) It's tangible. It's right there. It's in your browser. You can point your little finger at it, read it, copy it, paste it, print it...
It’s like a farmer, he can go from one tree to the next, plucking one piece of fruit at a time, just as a browser navigates from one website to another, one web page to the next. But at the end of the day everybody knows that the farmer will never produce anything useful unless he uses equipment to harvest the fruit, and A LOT of it quickly.
2) Fruit grows on trees. Websites are like trees (literally, they’re heirarchically shaped like trees!). Fruit typically grows on or near the ends of tree branches. Valuable web-data typcially resides in the pages on or near the end of website navigation branches.
In other words, if you were to produce a 3D model out of the heirarchical page structure of most websites, you’d get a tree, and the valuable data would look like fruit on or near the ends of the branches.
This last analogy is useful when it comes to designing tools to harvest web-data. The inherent tree-structure of most websites goes a long way in determining the underlying infrastructure of the data represented by the website, not to mention the HTML itself.
Comments
Add comment
Subscribe