Building Structured Web Community Portals.pdf

A Top-Down, Compositional, and Incremental Approach Pedro DeRose1 , Warren Shen1 , Fei Chen1 , AnHai Doan1 , Raghu Ramakrishnan2 1 University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2 Yahoo! Research ABSTRACT Structured community portals extract and integrate infor- mation from raw Web pages to present a uni?ed view of en- tities and relationships in the community. In this paper we argue that to build such portals, a top-down, compositional, and incremental approach is a good way to proceed. Com- pared to current approaches that employ complex mono- lithic techniques, this approach is easier to develop, under- stand, debug, and optimize. In this approach, we ?rst se- lect a small set of important community sources. Next, we compose plans that extract and integrate data from these sources, using a set of extraction/integration operators. Ex- ecuting these plans yields an initial structured portal. We then incrementally expand this portal by monitoring the evolution of current data sources, to detect and add new data sources. We describe our initial solutions to the above steps, and a case study of employing these solutions to build DBLife, a portal for the database community. We found that DBLife could be built quickly and achieve high accuracy us- ing simple extraction/integration operators, and that it can be maintained and expanded with little human e?ort. The initial solutions together with the case study demonstrate the feasibility and potential of our approach. 1. INTRODUCTION The World-Wide Web hosts numerous communities, each