  When we consider our CV, it is full of entities that we are or were
associated with and that define us in some way(s). Such entities include where
we studied, where we worked, who we collaborated with on a project or on a
paper etc. Entities we are linked to are part of who we are and may reveal
about what we are interested in. Hence, we can view any CV as a graph of
interlinked entities, where nodes are entities and edges are relations between
them. This study proposes a novel entity search framework that in response to a
real-time query about an entity, searches, crawls, analyzes and consolidates
relevant information that is freely available on the Web about the entity of
interest, culminating in the generation a profile of the searched entity.
Unlike typical entity search settings, in which a ranked list of entities
related to the target entity over a pre-specified relation is processed, we
present and visualize rich information about the entity of interest as a typed
entity-relation graph without an apriori definition of the types of related
entities and relations. This view is structured and compact, making it easy to
understand as well as interpret. It enables the user to learn not only about
the entity in question, but also about related entities, thereby obtaining a
better understanding of the entity in question. We evaluated each of the
frameworks components separately and then performed an overall evaluation of
the framework, its visualization and the interest of users in the results. The
results show that the proposed framework performs entity searches, related
entity identification and relation identification very well and that it
satisfies users needs.
