Towards Temporal URI Collections for Named Entities

Web archives represent crucial endeavors in preserving the Web from the past and provide a valuable resource for researchers of different disciplines. Due to their size, navigation in these collections is often limited to specifying an URI and the desired date. However, typical research questions often revolve around the evolution of entities instead of specific websites. Although full-text search often seems to be the first choice to look up web pages, while it provides a quick way to yield the best match with a keyword, its diversified ranking is not made for compiling reliable entity related collections. Further, it generally ignores the temporal relevance that is needed to find pages from the past, e.g., in web archives. In this paper, we present a collection of ranked resource identifiers, characterizing nam ed entities over time. For this purpose, different datasets were collected and evaluated by comparing each w ith a combination of others. Benchmarked against web search engines, our approach achieves a remarkable precision of 83.3 % and shows promising results for high-quality lookups and temporal collection building. To not only rely on existing datasets, we have implemented an interactive platform to get humans in the loop to expand the collection by contributing URIs, metadata and temporal information as well as to correct errors.