Coverage-Aware Web Crawling for Domain-Specific Supplier Discovery via a Web--Knowledge--Web Pipeline

Abstract

Identifying the full landscape of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in specialized industry sectors is critical for supply-chain resilience, yet existing business databases suffer from substantial coverage gaps -- particularly for sub-tier suppliers and firms in emerging niche markets. We propose a Web--Knowledge--Web (WKW) pipeline that iteratively (1)~crawls domain-specific web sources to discover candidate supplier entities, (2)~extracts and consolidates structured knowledge into a heterogeneous knowledge graph using domain-adapted few-shot LLM prompting, and (3)~uses the knowledge graph's topology and coverage signals to guide subsequent crawling toward under-represented regions of the supplier space. To quantify discovery completeness, we introduce a coverage estimation framework inspired by ecological species-richness estimators (Chao1, ACE) adapted for web-entity populations. Experiments on the semiconductor equipment manufacturing sector (NAICS 333242) demonstrate that the WKW pipeline achieves the highest precision (0.165) and F1 (0.123) among all methods while using only 144 pages -- 32\% fewer than the 213-page baseline budget -- building a knowledge graph of 664 entities and 542 relations with 100\% relation type-consistency.

Reproductions