Entity Popularity on the Web: Correlating ANSA News and AOL Search

摘要

Annotated Web content, digital libraries, news and media portals, e-commerce web sites, online catalogs, RDF/OWL knowledge bases and online encyclopedias can be considered containers of named entities such as organizations, persons, locations. Entities are mostly implicitly mentioned in texts or multi-media content, but increasingly explicit in structured annotations such as the ones provided by the Semantic Web. Today, as a result of different research projects and commercial initiatives, systems deal with massive amounts of data that are either explicitly or implicitly related to entities, which have to managed in an efficient way. This paper contributes to Web Science by attempting to measure and interpret trends of entity popularity on the WWW, taking into consideration the occurrence of named entities in a large news corpus, and correlating these findings with analysis results on how entities are searched for, based on a large search engine query log. The study shows that entity popularity follows well-known trends, which can be of interest for several aspects in the development of services and applications on the WWW that deal with larger amounts of data about (named) entities.