CAREER: Building and Searching a Structured Web Database

该项目研究提取和搜索网络嵌入结构化数据集的技术。 例如，制造商的站点可能包含技术产品数据，政府站点可能包含经济统计数据。不幸的是，此类数据可能很难与周围的文本隔离，并且很难使用专门关注文档的现有搜索引擎找到。 提取步骤的方法是使用当前不完整的数据集来产生大量可能的提取器“组合”，将它们全部应用于爬行的 Web 内容，然后测试哪些最成功。 搜索步骤的方法是检查用户查询日志，以找到描述主题词与描述数据集结构的词之间关系的常见模式；例如，“密西西比河附近的濒危物种”是多对多地理关系的原型。 这项工作的中心目标是最终为网络的结构化数据组件构建一个可用的搜索引擎。该项目的成功可能会增加广大用户对结构化数据集的访问。 该项目还将产生大量与科学研究相关的新颖提取数据，以及有用的工具和查询日志。 为了配合研究计划，该项目涉及一项教育计划，其中包括修订的本科课程材料、围绕数据集和工具开发在线教育材料以及向当地农村高中教授的网络主题课程。 所有项目结果将在项目网站 (http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~michjc/structuredweb/index.html) 上发布。

This project investigates techniques for extracting and searching Web-embedded structured datasets. For example, a manufacturer's site may contain technical product data, and a governmental site may contain economic statistics. Unfortunately, such data can be hard to isolate from surrounding text, and difficult to find using existing search engines that focus exclusively on documents. The approach for the extraction step is to use current incomplete datasets to induce a large "portfolio" of possible extractors, apply all of them to crawled Web content, then test which are most successful. The approach for the search step is to examine user query logs to find common patterns that describe the relationship between topic words and words that describe the dataset's structure; e.g., "endangered species near the Mississippi River" is a prototype for a many-to-many geographic relationship. The central goal of this work is to eventually construct a working search engine for the structured-data component of the Web.The success of this project is likely to increase access to structured datasets for a very broad population of users. The project will also yield a large amount of novel extracted data relevant for scientific research, plus useful tools and query logs. To accompany the research program, this project involves an educational plan that includes revised undergraduate course material, development of online educational material surrounding the datasets and tools, and a course on Web topics taught to a local rural high school. All project results will be distributed at the project's Web site (http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~michjc/structuredweb/index.html).