Automatically building probabilistic databases from the web

Lorenzo Blanco, Mirko Bronzi, Valter Crescenzi, Paolo Merialdo, Paolo Papotti

Abstract: A relevant number of web sites publish structured data about recognizable concepts (such as stock quotes, movies, restau- rants, etc.). There is a great chance to create applications that rely on a huge amount of data taken from the Web. We present an automatic and domain independent system that performs all the steps required to benefit from these data: it discovers data intensive web sites containing information about an entity of interest, extracts and integrate the published data, and finally performs a probabilistic analysis to characterize the impreciseness of the data and the accuracy of the sources. The results of the processing can be used to populate a probabilistic database.