End-to-End Conversion of HTML Tables for Populating a Relational Database

Authors

George Nagy, Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteFollow
David W. Embley, Brigham Young UniversityFollow
Sharad C. Seth, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Citation

G. Nagy, D. W. Embley, Seth Seth, End-to-End Conversion of HTML Tables for Populating a Relational Database, Proc. DAS 2014, Tours, France, 2014.

Abstract

Automating the conversion of human-readable HTML tables into machine-readable relational tables will enable end-user query processing of the millions of data tables found on the web. Theoretically sound and experimentally successful methods for index-based segmentation, extraction of category hierarchies, and construction of a canonical table suitable for direct input to a relational database are demonstrated on 200 heterogeneous web tables. The methods are scalable: the program generates the 198 Access compatible CSV files in ~0.1s per table (two tables could not be indexed).