ISTAT Farm Register: Data Collection by Using Web Scraping for Agritourism Farms

The Farm Register is a key element for the Agricultural Statistical System. Agritourism Farms (AFs) represent a small sub-population of the units included in the Farm Register (around 20,000 out of 1.7 million in 2013), but their number is increasing along the time and acquiring importance from an economic point of view. Given the tendency of using the World Wide Web to substitute the traditional way of acquiring information, ISTAT is now experimenting the possibility to collect such information directly from the sparse and unstructured information in the Internet, belonging to the vast category of Big Data, by means of a web scraping technique. A specific scraping application is developed for one of the most important hubs (TripAdvisor) and an another one for scraping individual websites. The text collected in this way requires a specific processing step finalised to extract and structure the information of interest. At the end of the process, the obtained information is used not only to update the existing information available on the Farm Register, but also to enrich it, permitting the production and the periodical dissemination of statistics related to the activities and to the services offered by the AFs, at a minimum cost. This strategy permits also to check the information (regarding newly born farms or ceased ones) stored in the Register, pertaining to the coverage of the frame. From a statistical point of view, such derived information represent a new methodological framework, that requires the evaluation of specific quality indicators.