  Users are tapping into massive, heterogeneous entity graphs for many
applications. It is challenging to select entity graphs for a particular need,
given abundant datasets from many sources and the oftentimes scarce information
for them. We propose methods to produce preview tables for compact presentation
of important entity types and relationships in entity graphs. The preview
tables assist users in attaining a quick and rough preview of the data. They
can be shown in a limited display space for a user to browse and explore,
before she decides to spend time and resources to fetch and investigate the
complete dataset. We formulate several optimization problems that look for
previews with the highest scores according to intuitive goodness measures,
under various constraints on preview size and distance between preview tables.
The optimization problem under distance constraint is NP-hard. We design a
dynamic-programming algorithm and an Apriori-style algorithm for finding
optimal previews. Results from experiments, comparison with related work and
user studies demonstrated the scoring measures' accuracy and the discovery
algorithms' efficiency.
