The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessible via the Internet. Through utilization of a web browser, a user can load a web page that includes text, images, videos and other multimedia, and can navigate between webpages by way of selection of hyperlinks. The amount of information that is available on the World Wide Web has increased dramatically since its inception, causing retrieval of information that is relevant to a particular user's interests to be a complex problem. Search engines have been developed, wherein a search engine is tasked with indexing web pages, receiving textual queries from users, and providing a ranked list of web pages that are believed to be most relevant to the users (based upon the queries). Due to the massive number of web pages that are available, however, it is often times difficult to provide users with relevant information.
To help users access information, computer-executable systems have been developed that attempt to address the need for machine-readable web content, where the World Wide Web is no longer perceived as being a collection of web pages, but rather a web of entities with relations therebetween. While technologies and specifications exist for identifying named entities in web pages available on the World Wide Web (and annotating such web pages to identify named entities), there is currently a lack of technologies that “bridge the gap” between the web of documents (web pages) and the web of data (entities and their relations). In other words, conventionally, to retrieve additional information about a named entity in a document, users must employ hyperlinks to seek out contextual information from external sources. In an example, a web page may include the named entity “Barack Obama”, and such named entity can be automatically identified. A hyperlink can be added to the text, wherein the hyperlink links the web page with another web page (e.g., a Wiki page) that includes additional information about the named entity. Therefore, if a user wishes to acquire additional information about the named entity, the user can select the hyperlink and be directed towards another web page.
Oftentimes, however, owners of a web page will desire that the user remain on such web page for an extended amount of time. For instance, search engines aim to keep users viewing their pages longer by presenting structured data from external sources locally, thereby increasing the likelihood of generating revenue from that user (e.g., when the user selects an advertisement). Acquiring structured data in a manner that is not time and labor intensive, however, is a focus of ongoing research.