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

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 (W→K→W) 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 W→K→W 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.