MetaRAG: Identifying Website Owner using Meta-Path-Guided Dynamic Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Website owner identification aims to link websites to their real-world owners, which is crucial for credibility assessment and information provenance in information retrieval and vital for applications in cybersecurity, Internet governance, and digital regulation. Existing approaches for website owner identification primarily rely on querying infrastructure registration records or analyzing webpage content. However, these methods often fail due to incomplete or outdated registration records and sparse webpage content. We observe that inter-website relationships, derived from shared infrastructure data such as primary domains, IP blocks, and geolocations, can provide valuable but underutilized ownership cues. To exploit this insight, we propose MetaRAG, a meta-path-guided dynamic graph retrieval-augmented generation framework that performs reasoning using large language models over ownership-relevant paths in a website-centric knowledge graph. MetaRAG consists of three components: 1) a knowledge graph construction module that integrates infrastructure data and crawled webpage content into a unified representation; 2) a meta-path-guided dynamic reasoning module that constrains retrieval to ownership-relevant meta-paths and adaptively decides whether to retrieve more information or perform inference based on evidence completeness; and 3) a multi-path evidence refinement module that aggregates and scores retrieved paths to suppress noise and distill high-confidence ownership signals. We evaluate MetaRAG on two constructed real-world datasets, achieving up to 6.82% improvement over strong baselines. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in combining structured web knowledge with large language model-based reasoning for more accurate website owner identification.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Information Systems
Published
2026-03-13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3800961
Primary Topic
Web Data Mining and Analysis
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

MetaRAG: Identifying Website Owner using Meta-Path-Guided Dynamic Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Bingyang Guo, Cheng Tu, Yong Li, Yunshan Ma et al.
ACM Transactions on Information Systems
Web Data Mining and Analysis
article

MetaRAG: Identifying Website Owner using Meta-Path-Guided Dynamic Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Bingyang Guo, Cheng Tu, Yong Li, Yunshan Ma, Qianyu Li, Mengya Zhang, Fan Shi, Xiang Wang
article en

Abstract

Website owner identification aims to link websites to their real-world owners, which is crucial for credibility assessment and information provenance in information retrieval and vital for applications in cybersecurity, Internet governance, and digital regulation. Existing approaches for website owner identification primarily rely on querying infrastructure registration records or analyzing webpage content. However, these methods often fail due to incomplete or outdated registration records and sparse webpage content. We observe that inter-website relationships, derived from shared infrastructure data such as primary domains, IP blocks, and geolocations, can provide valuable but underutilized ownership cues. To exploit this insight, we propose MetaRAG, a meta-path-guided dynamic graph retrieval-augmented generation framework that performs reasoning using large language models over ownership-relevant paths in a website-centric knowledge graph. MetaRAG consists of three components: 1) a knowledge graph construction module that integrates infrastructure data and crawled webpage content into a unified representation; 2) a meta-path-guided dynamic reasoning module that constrains retrieval to ownership-relevant meta-paths and adaptively decides whether to retrieve more information or perform inference based on evidence completeness; and 3) a multi-path evidence refinement module that aggregates and scores retrieved paths to suppress noise and distill high-confidence ownership signals. We evaluate MetaRAG on two constructed real-world datasets, achieving up to 6.82% improvement over strong baselines. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in combining structured web knowledge with large language model-based reasoning for more accurate website owner identification.

ACM Transactions on Information Systems
University of Science and Technology of China (CN), National University of Defense Technology (CN), Singapore Management University (SG)
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Openalex Percentile: Top 41%
Web Data Mining and Analysis
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