Query selection techniques for efficient crawling of structured Web sources

The high quality, structured data from Web structured sources is invaluable for many applications. Hidden Web databases are not directly crawlable by Web search engines and are only accessible through Web query forms or via Web service interfaces. Recent research efforts have been focusing on understanding these Web query forms. A critical but still largely unresolved question is: how to efficiently acquire the structured information inside Web databases through iteratively issuing meaningful queries? In this paper we focus on the central issue of enabling efficient Web database crawling through query selection, i.e. how to select good queries to rapidly harvest data records from Web databases. We model each structured Web database as a distinct attribute-value graph. Under this theoretical framework, the database crawling problem is transformed into a graph traversal one that follows "relational" links. We show that finding an optimal query selection plan is equivalent to finding a Minimum Weighted Dominating Set of the corresponding database graph, a well-known NP-Complete problem. We propose a suite of query selection techniques aiming at optimizing the query harvest rate. Extensive experimental evaluations over real Web sources and simulations over controlled database servers validate the effectiveness of our techniques and provide insights for future efforts in this direction