TY - JOUR
T1 - Automating the extraction of data from HTML tables with unknown structure
AU - Embley, David W.
AU - Tao, Cui
AU - Liddle, Stephen W.
N1 - Funding Information:
Supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant IIS-0083127. Also supported in part by the Kevin and Debra Rollins Center for eBusiness at Brigham Young University.
PY - 2005/7
Y1 - 2005/7
N2 - Data on the Web in HTML tables is mostly structured, but we usually do not know the structure in advance. Thus, we cannot directly query for data of interest. We propose a solution to this problem based on document-independent extraction ontologies. Our solution entails elements of table understanding, data integration, and wrapper creation. Table understanding allows us to find tables of interest within a Web page, recognize attributes and values within the table, pair attributes with values, and form records. Data-integration techniques allow us to match source records with a target schema. Ontologically specified wrappers allow us to extract data from source records into a target schema. Experimental results show that we can successfully locate data of interest in tables and map the data from source HTML tables with unknown structure to a given target database schema. We can thus "directly" query source data with unknown structure through a known target schema.
AB - Data on the Web in HTML tables is mostly structured, but we usually do not know the structure in advance. Thus, we cannot directly query for data of interest. We propose a solution to this problem based on document-independent extraction ontologies. Our solution entails elements of table understanding, data integration, and wrapper creation. Table understanding allows us to find tables of interest within a Web page, recognize attributes and values within the table, pair attributes with values, and form records. Data-integration techniques allow us to match source records with a target schema. Ontologically specified wrappers allow us to extract data from source records into a target schema. Experimental results show that we can successfully locate data of interest in tables and map the data from source HTML tables with unknown structure to a given target database schema. We can thus "directly" query source data with unknown structure through a known target schema.
KW - Data integration
KW - Document-independent extraction ontologies
KW - Table understanding
KW - Wrapper creation
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U2 - 10.1016/j.datak.2004.10.004
DO - 10.1016/j.datak.2004.10.004
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:16244404907
SN - 0169-023X
VL - 54
SP - 3
EP - 28
JO - Data and Knowledge Engineering
JF - Data and Knowledge Engineering
IS - 1
T2 - 21st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling ER
Y2 - 7 October 2002 through 11 October 2002
ER -