Harvesting and Organizing Knowledge from the Web

Information organization and search on the Web is gaining structure and context awareness and more semantic flavor, for example, in the forms of faceted search, vertical search, entity search, and Deep-Web search. I envision another big leap forward by automatically harvesting and organizing knowledge from the Web, represented in terms of explicit entities and relations as well as ontological concepts. This will be made possible by the confluence of three strong trends: 1) rich Semantic-Web-style knowledge repositories like ontologies and taxonomies, 2) large-scale information extraction from high-quality text sources such as Wikipedia, and 3) social tagging in the spirit of Web 2.0. I refer to the three directions as Semantic Web, Statistical Web, and Social Web (at the risk of some oversimplification), and I briefly characterize each of them.