Structured Data Meets the Web: A Few Observations

The World Wide Web is witnessing an increase in the amount of structured content ñ vast heterogeneous collections of structured data are on the rise due to the Deep Web, annotation schemes like Flickr, and sites like Google Base. While this phenomenon is creating an opportunity for structured data man- agement, dealing with heterogeneity on the web-scale presents many new challenges. In this paper we articulate challenges based on our experience with addressing them at Google, and offer some principles for addressing them in a general fashion.