Search Engine-Based Web Information Extraction

Abstract

In this chapter we discuss approaches to find, extract, and structure information from natural language texts on the Web. Such structured information can be expressed and shared using the standard Semantic Web languages and hence be machine interpreted. In this chapter we focus on two tasks in Web information extraction. The first part focuses on mining facts from the Web, while in the second part, we present an approach to collect community-based meta-data. A search engine is used to retrieve potentially relevant texts. From these texts, instances and relations are extracted. The proposed approaches are illustrated using various case-studies, showing that we can reliably extract information from the Web using simple techniques.