Entity Search Engine Towards Agile BestEffort Information Integration over the Web.pdf

Entity Search Engine: Towards Agile Best-Effort Information Integration over the Web Tao Cheng, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tcheng3, kcchang@ 1. INTRODUCTION The immense scale and wide spread has rendered the Web as an ultimate information repository– as not only the sources where wefind but also the destinations where we publish infor- A mation. The dual forces have enriched the Web with all kinds of data, much beyond the conventional page view of the Web AA.com as a corpus of HTML pages, or “documents.” The Web has C thus become a rich collection of data-rich pages, on the “sur- face Web” of static URLs (e.g., personal or company home- BN.com pages) as well as the “deep Web” of database-backed contents (e.g., flights from ), as Figure 1(a) shows. The richness of data, while a promising opportunity, has challenged us to effectively find data we need, from one or multiple sources. In particular, we are motivated by, when building the Meta- Figure 1: The data-rich Web. Querier at UIUC, the need of large scale on-the-fly integration essarily time consuming. for online structured data. The MetaQuerier system, as we Scenario 2: To apply for graduate schools, how can she find reported in CIDR 2005 [4], aims at finding and querying data the list of “professors” in the database area? She has to go sources on the deep Web. However, as the “last mile” for meta- through all the CS department pages or, even worse, c