WOO: a scalable and multi-tenant platform for continuous knowledge base synthesis

Search, exploration and social experience on the Web has recently undergone tremendous changes with search engines, web portals and social networks offering a different perspective on information discovery and consumption. This new perspective is aimed at capturing user intents, and providing richer and highly connected experiences. The new battleground revolves around technologies for the ingestion, disambiguation and enrichment of entities from a variety of structured and unstructured data sources - we refer to this process as knowledge base synthesis. This paper presents the design, implementation and production deployment of the Web Of Objects (WOO) system, a Hadoop-based platform tackling such challenges. WOO has been designed and implemented to enable various products in Yahoo! to synthesize knowledge bases (KBs) of entities relevant to their domains. Currently, the implementation of WOO we describe is used by various Yahoo! properties such as Intonow, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! Events and Yahoo! Search. This paper highlights: (i) challenges that arise in designing, building and operating a platform that handles multi-domain, multi-version, and multi-tenant disambiguation of web-scale knowledge bases (hundreds of millions of entities), (ii) the architecture and technical solutions we devised, and (iii) an evaluation on real-world production datasets.