research-article

WebTables: exploring the power of tables on the web

Authors:

Michael J. Cafarella,

Daisy Zhe Wang,

Yang ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 1, Issue 1

Pages 538 - 549

https://doi.org/10.14778/1453856.1453916

Published: 01 August 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The World-Wide Web consists of a huge number of unstructured documents, but it also contains structured data in the form of HTML tables. We extracted 14.1 billion HTML tables from Google's general-purpose web crawl, and used statistical classification techniques to find the estimated 154M that contain high-quality relational data. Because each relational table has its own "schema" of labeled and typed columns, each such table can be considered a small structured database. The resulting corpus of databases is larger than any other corpus we are aware of, by at least five orders of magnitude.

We describe the WEBTABLES system to explore two fundamental questions about this collection of databases. First, what are effective techniques for searching for structured data at search-engine scales? Second, what additional power can be derived by analyzing such a huge corpus?

First, we develop new techniques for keyword search over a corpus of tables, and show that they can achieve substantially higher relevance than solutions based on a traditional search engine. Second, we introduce a new object derived from the database corpus: the attribute correlation statistics database (AcsDB) that records corpus-wide statistics on co-occurrences of schema elements. In addition to improving search relevance, the AcsDB makes possible several novel applications: schema auto-complete, which helps a database designer to choose schema elements; attribute synonym finding, which automatically computes attribute synonym pairs for schema matching; and join-graph traversal, which allows a user to navigate between extracted schemas using automatically-generated join links.

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Cited By

Kayali MLykov AFountalis IVasiloglou NOlteanu DSuciu D(2024)Chorus: Foundation Models for Unified Data Discovery and ExplorationProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3659437.365946117:8(2104-2114)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3659437.3659461
Bodensohn JBinnig C(2024)Rethinking Table Retrieval from Data LakesProceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Exploiting Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Data Management10.1145/3663742.3663972(1-5)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
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Döhmen TGeacu RHulsebos MSchelter S(2024)SchemaPile: A Large Collection of Relational Database SchemasProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36549752:3(1-25)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
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Index Terms

WebTables: exploring the power of tables on the web
1. Information systems

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cover image Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment Volume 1, Issue 1

August 2008

1216 pages

ISSN:2150-8097

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VLDB Endowment

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Published: 01 August 2008

Published in PVLDB Volume 1, Issue 1

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Cited By

Kayali MLykov AFountalis IVasiloglou NOlteanu DSuciu D(2024)Chorus: Foundation Models for Unified Data Discovery and ExplorationProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3659437.365946117:8(2104-2114)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3659437.3659461
Bodensohn JBinnig C(2024)Rethinking Table Retrieval from Data LakesProceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Exploiting Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Data Management10.1145/3663742.3663972(1-5)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663742.3663972
Döhmen TGeacu RHulsebos MSchelter S(2024)SchemaPile: A Large Collection of Relational Database SchemasProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36549752:3(1-25)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3654975
Wu TLi LGao HQi GWang YLi Y(2024)NPEL: Neural Paired Entity Linking in Web TablesACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/3652511Online publication date: 19-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3652511
Zecchini LBleifuß TSimonini GBergamaschi SNaumann F(2024)Determining the Largest Overlap between TablesProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36393032:1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639303
Ye CLu GWang HLi LWu SChen GZhao JChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Towards Cross-Table Masked Pretraining for Web Data MiningProceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645707(4449-4459)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
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Berenguer AMazón JTomás D(2024)Word embeddings for retrieving tabular data from research publicationsMachine Language10.1007/s10994-023-06472-0113:4(2227-2248)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
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Fan GWang JLi YZhang DMiller R(2023)Semantics-Aware Dataset Discovery from Data Lakes with Contextualized Column-Based Representation LearningProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3587136.358714616:7(1726-1739)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
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Miao ZWang J(2023)Watchog: A Light-weight Contrastive Learning based Framework for Column AnnotationProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36267661:4(1-24)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
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Wang QCastro Fernandez R(2023)Solo: Data Discovery Using Natural Language Questions Via A Self-Supervised ApproachProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36267561:4(1-27)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
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