GOLD-TRADER: A WEB-BASED MOBILE
APPLICATION
Abdullah Al-Ghushami, Muhammad Hilmi Yusoff,Afiq Aisamuddin
School of Computing,
UUM College of Arts and Sciences, University Utara Malaysia
0601 UUM Sintok Kedah,Malaysia
a_ghashami02@yahoo.com, s813554@student.uum.edu.my,maxis5049876@yahoo.com
Abstract-The information extraction is one of the common data
processing that used to capture and retrieve real information.
This paper showed information extraction concept that
proposed for automation process of extracting large collections
of data from several domains. This paper also presented about
how to build web information extraction application. Such
Gold-Trader application that used information extraction
concept. This application was developed using PHP webscripting techniques. The reader will get to know Gold-Trader
application as web information extraction application. For this
application, we select gold and silver as our focused domain, as
well as the readers will also know the development method
process, benefits and the limitation of this application. Thus,
this application enable user to extract the information from
different web-pages.At the end of this article the readers will
be able to develop their knowledge and have more
understanding about information extraction mobile based
applications.
Keywords—Information
Applicatoin;
I.
Extraction;Gold-Trader
INFORMATIN EXTRACTION CONCEPT
Nowadays, The World Wide Web has contained massive
amount of the information or data in the internet. But due the
complexity of structure of Web data sources, access to these
massive information have limited to search and view
information. The extraction of information helps users in
getting their data quickly and efficiently [1].
Additionally, The Internet shows big amount of useful
data that has always been designed for its users, which
creates the hard toextract relatedinformation from
multiplesources [1][4]. Thus, several Techniques for
information extraction are developed for web-pages
application. These techniques help users to managevarious
web information, it also can create easy way to retrieve the
information or data from different sources in the internet
[3].
may be given to any type of process which clearly constructs
and collects information that have been found. Additionally,
information extraction applications can be functional as
similar to information retrieval systems. It always replies to
the data needed by the users [7].
At the moment, the majority of information extraction
functions have been managed manually by people analysts
who may view a source documents and update the database
entries by hand. But this type of work can be considered as
time consume, boring, and hard to control the quality.
Furthermore, Information extraction task also have been defined
as
input and extraction target. input can classify as
unstructured documents such as text which write in natural
language or can be classified as semistructured documents
that are spread in a Web page like tables or enumerated lists.
Subsequently, Information extraction used to meets the
issues or problem for extracting particular data or
information from the collection of several sources[2][9].
Due to the information extraction problem, Information
extraction techniques or technologies have been arisen to
meet the needs for functional processing of texts in
particular domains. Several techniques(i.e. PHP Scripting
and Wrapper)[5] are used to extract information or data
from input; in addition these techniques helps users to
search any item from web-pages.in the last Information
extractions have been dealing with any data in different
formats[6][8].
In this paper, it is basically discussing about introduction
and motivation of Gold-Trader application and show the
implementation of this application in section 2. In this
article, section 3 provides benefit of Gold-Trader
application, section 4 shows the limitation and future
recommendation.
II.
Furthermore, in the last decade, the information and data
blast have been increased the demands in term of processing
and analyzing big amount of data. The information
extraction may consider as most common type of the
document processing that grab and results real data consisted
inside the document.The name of Information extraction
INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION
We have developed a web-based mobile application
known as Gold-Trader for our web information extraction
system project. For this application, we decided to choose
gold and silver as our focused domain. The reason behind
the given name of our application is that we hope we can
extend the function of the application so that it can become
an established marketplace for our targeted customers in the
near future.
Furthermore, the relevance for choosing gold and silver
as the domain for the application is that, after we have done
some research on what domain to choose, we found that this
domain is less popular compared to the domain such as
computer gadgets and flight ticketing. Yet, everyone knows
the value behind it. Currently, people who look to possess
gold and silver are just depending only on one website. This
is because there lacks some website that does comparison of
prices of gold and silver. Due to this, most of them suffer
from lack of knowledge of gold and silver market prices,
forcing them to spend recklessly on them.[10].
III. CONCEPT AND IMPLEMENTATION
The idea behind the development of this application is
simple and easy. First, we scrape a page from a website and
store all the values we retrieved into an array. We collected
and gathered all the data from these four gold and silver
traders’ websites;




GoldCrest Pavilion Sdn. Bhd.
(http://www.gcp.com.my/),
Gold Silver Resources Sdn. Bhd.
(http://gsr2u.com.my/sistem/index.php?route=common/
home),
Public Gold Marketing Sdn. Bhd.
(https://publicgold.com.my/v1/),
World Islamic Mint
(http://www.worldislamicmint.my/).
Next, we filtered the values to be used in the
application and converted them into string. We wrote the
code using PHP web-scripting language to implement these
two concepts [7].Here are some of the core codes to do the
information extraction from other websites into our
application:
1) The file_get_contents () reads a content file from
a certain web page and converts it into a string. It
uses memory mapping techniques to scrape all of
the data.
$pg_string =
file_get_contents('http://www.publicgold.com.m
y/v1/components/com_publicgold/wb/liveprice.p
hp');
2) The preg_match_all () function matches all
occurrences of pattern in string ($pg_string). All
of the data in “(.*?)”, will be stored in the array
($pg) in order.
preg_match_all('/<td\\s*bgcolor=.*?>RM(.*?)<\
/td>/', $pg_string, $pg);
Example of the code is
<td bgcolor=red>RM199.00</td>, then it will
store “199.00” into $pg array
3) This is how we store the array list into the
$pg_sell_dinar_1 as a variable, so we can use
it on our PHP.
$pg_sell_dinar_1 = ($pg[1][12]);
4) Strip away all symbol, only set number 0 to 9 and
“.” into the string. So, if the number got “,”, it will
be removed away. Example 5,986.20, it will
convert into only 5986.20. So the data can be
converted into numbering and it can be
manipulated for future use.
$pg_sell_dinar_1 = preg_replace('/[^09.]+/', '', $pg_sell_dinar_1);
5) This is how we set the output to display. Example,
5986.20 convert into 5,986.20 or 5986 into
5986.00
<?php echo $english_format_number =
number_format($pg_sell_dinar_1) ?>
Finally, we organized the data well and displayed
them nicely into our web-based mobile application. For this
part, we have utilized Java programming language to code
the frame.
IV.
BENEFIT OF GOLD-TRADER
To always serve and provide great users’ experience has
always become our keen in developing this application. For
that reason, our application currently focuses on three
important functions. These three functions were developed
because these functions are mostly lacking in websites
providing gold and silver information. We have simplified
these three important functions of our application in usecase diagram in Appendix A.
The first important function is users can view live
updates of gold and silver market prices via our application.
We provide the live updates of gold and silver market prices
by using graphical animated graphs. We put this graph at the
homepage of the application because we want the users to
see this as the first thing for their ease and benefit. The
sequence diagram for this function and the print-screen of
the application’s homepage can be found in Appendix B.
Part from providing live-updates of gold and silver
market prices, we also offer the users the ease of viewing
gold and silver prices from various companies. Parallel with
the concept of information extraction, we take the liberty to
extract the prices of gold and silver from those websites
mentioned above so that users can have more options to
choose to buy from any company that they want. Users can
choose to view gold or silver prices from all companies in a
nicely organized interface created and designed by us. The
sequence diagram for this function and the print-screen of
the application’s interface can be found in Appendix C.
Last but not least, we make the users possible to compare
the prices of gold and silver from all companies. Users may
no longer have to open one-by-one all the gold and silver
traders’ websites and check each and every prices they have
offered. We have provided them all in our website in a
simple-to-view table and all they need to do is just pick and
choose. The sequence diagram for this function and the
print-screen of the application’s interface can be found in
Appendix D.
V.
LIMITATION AND FUTURE
RECOMMENDATION
gold and silver from all companies so that they can make
comparison on which gold or silver to buy. Therefore, in the
future we hope our web-based mobile application can be a
great market place for all gold and silver traders and users
can just click and pay from there.
VI.
This paper introduces Gold-Trade system as web-based
mobile application implemented using the concept of
information extraction system. This application uses gold
and silver as a domain. This application was developed
using PHP web-scripting language and Java programming
language. Gold-Trader provides the users the ease of
viewing live updates of gold and silver current market prices.
The users can view prices of gold and silver from various
gold and silver traders and make comparison of those prices.
Currently, the application suffers from having to load a
large amount of data every time the users open or refresh it
and it does not provide an ease of doing transaction for the
users and the gold and silver traders. All and all, Gold-trader
guarantees the users the knowledge of spending on gold and
silver wisely.This gold-trader system shows how to extract
information which users have been interested in from
different Web pages.
APPENDICES
a) APPENDIX A
“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection
we can catch excellence.” This divine quote was uttered by
Vince Lombardi, one of the greatest men in football in the
US. This quote has reminded us that there is no such thing
as perfection, yet as long as we keen to improve ourselves,
there will always be something to celebrate. This indeed
includes our developed application. There are several
limitation in our application that we think could be
improved as future development, provided more resources
and time.
One of the limitations is every time the users refresh the
application to view the latest update of gold and silver
prices, the application needs to load a big amount of data all
over again. This is what we have to pay for putting
graphical animated graph on the homepage. Thus, the
possible solution that we think to be implemented in the
near future is that to create an xml file every time users open
or refresh the application. The file will be supposedly used
to store all the data, so that the application will no more
have to load all the data all over again.
Another thing, currently we do not provide the direct link
to the website we extracted the data from. As the
ramification, the users themselves have to go the website
where the price was extracted if they wish to buy any gold
and silver. For now, we only provide them all the prices of
CONCLUSION
b) APPENDIX B
c)
APPENDIX C
d) APPENDIX D
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