Searching Entities on the Web by Sample

ABSTRACT Several Web sites deliver a large number of pages, each publishing data about one instance of some real world entity, such as an athlete, a stock quote, a book. Despite it is easy for a human reader to recognize these instances, current search engines are unaware of them. Technologies for the Semantic Web aim at achieving this goal; however, so far they have been of little help in this respect, as semantic publishing is very limited. The paper describes a method,to automatically search on the Web for pages that publish data representing an instance of a certain conceptual entity. Our method,takes as input a small set of sample pages: it automatically infers a description of the underlying conceptual entity and then searches the Web for other pages containing data representing the same entity. We have implemented our method in a system prototype, which has been used to conduct several experiments that have produced interesting results. 2 Contents