Distributed Entity Search

Capturing information about entities of the real world (i.e. locations, people, institutions and others) is a goal that is gaining more attention in today’s web of data. We believe that this capturing would only be possible if users can contribute and interact as they do in the real world. The contribution and interaction of users may take place over a distributed network where they can publish information about known entities. We think that the contribution of users will not happen, if the network can not be considered also as a source of information for them. Therefore, this PHD thesis aims to address the problem of finding entities (i.e. information about entities) that are related to the information needs of the user, in order to consolidate a web of data, which is based on entities. These entities need to be found from a collection, which can be distributed and where each entity can be described from the points of view of different users. In this proposal we analyze different layers of abstractions in the context of an entity-centric application, which allow users to define and share their entities. Then, we describe the problem of entity search in a distributed environment considering the different abstraction layers. We end with a discussion of possible approaches for the solution, where a network architecture for the search is proposed.