Extending Tables with Data from over a Million Websites

Abstract. This Big Data Track submission demonstrates how the BTC 2014 dataset, Microdata annotations from thousands of websites, as well as millions of HTML tables are used to extend local tables with additional columns. Ta-ble extension is a useful operation within a wide range of application scenarios: Imagine you are an analyst having a local table describing companies and you want to extend this table with the headquarter of each company. Or imagine you are a film enthusiast and want to extend a table describing films with attributes like director, genre, and release date of each film. The Mannheim Search Joins Engine automatically performs such table extension operations based on a large data corpus gathered from over a million websites that publish structured data in various formats. Given a local table, the Mannheim Search Joins Engine searches the corpus for additional data describing the entities of the input table. The dis-covered data are then joined with the local table and their content is consolidated using schema matching and data fusion methods. As result, the user is presented with an extended table and given the opportunity to examine the provenance o

Gathering Information on the Web by Consistent Entity Augmentation

Users usually want to gather information about what they are interested in, which could be achieved by entity augmentation using a vast amount of web tables. Existing techniques assume that web tables are entity-attribute binary tables. As for tables having multiple columns to be augmented, they will be split into several entity-attribute binary relations, which would cause semantic fragmentation. Furthermore, the result table consolidated by binary relations will suffer from entity inconsistency and low precision. The objective of our research is to return a consistent result table for entity augmentation when given a set of entities and attribute names. In this paper we propose a web information gathering framework based on consistent entity augmentation. To ensure high consistency and precision of the result table we propose that answer tables for building result table should have consistent matching relationships with each other. Instead of splitting tables into pieces we regard web tables as nodes and consistent matching relationships as edges to make a consistent clique and expand it until its coverage for augmentation query reaches certain threshold gamma. It is proved in this paper that a consistent result table could be built by considering tables in consistent clique to be answer tables. We tested our method on four real-life datasets, compared it with different answer table selection methods and state-of-the-art entity augmentation technique based on table fragmentation as well. The results of a comprehensive set of experiments indicate that our entity augmentation framework is more effective than the existing method in getting consistent entity augmentation results with high accuracy and reliability

Yavaa: supporting data workflows from discovery to visualization

Recent years have witness an increasing number of data silos being opened up both within organizations and to the general public: Scientists publish their raw data as supplements to articles or even standalone artifacts to enable others to verify and extend their work. Governments pass laws to open up formerly protected data treasures to improve accountability and transparency as well as to enable new business ideas based on this public good. Even companies share structured information about their products and services to advertise their use and thus increase revenue. Exploiting this wealth of information holds many challenges for users, though. Oftentimes data is provided as tables whose sheer endless rows of daunting numbers are barely accessible. InfoVis can mitigate this gap. However, offered visualization options are generally very limited and next to no support is given in applying any of them. The same holds true for data wrangling. Only very few options to adjust the data to the current needs and barely any protection are in place to prevent even the most obvious mistakes. When it comes to data from multiple providers, the situation gets even bleaker. Only recently tools emerged to search for datasets across institutional borders reasonably. Easy-to-use ways to combine these datasets are still missing, though. Finally, results generally lack proper documentation of their provenance. So even the most compelling visualizations can be called into question when their coming about remains unclear. The foundations for a vivid exchange and exploitation of open data are set, but the barrier of entry remains relatively high, especially for non-expert users. This thesis aims to lower that barrier by providing tools and assistance, reducing the amount of prior experience and skills required. It covers the whole workflow ranging from identifying proper datasets, over possible transformations, up until the export of the result in the form of suitable visualizations

Web-scale web table to knowledge base matching

Millions of relational HTML tables are found on the World Wide Web. In contrast to unstructured text, relational web tables provide a compact representation of entities described by attributes. The data within these tables covers a broad topical range. Web table data is used for question answering, augmentation of search results, and knowledge base completion. Until a few years ago, only search engines companies like Google and Microsoft owned large web crawls from which web tables are extracted. Thus, researches outside the companies have not been able to work with web tables. In this thesis, the first publicly available web table corpus containing millions of web tables is introduced. The corpus enables interested researchers to experiment with web tables. A profile of the corpus is created to give insights to the characteristics and topics. Further, the potential of web tables for augmenting cross-domain knowledge bases is investigated. For the use case of knowledge base augmentation, it is necessary to understand the web table content. For this reason, web tables are matched to a knowledge base. The matching comprises three matching tasks: instance, property, and class matching. Existing web table to knowledge base matching systems either focus on a subset of these matching tasks or are evaluated using gold standards which also only cover a subset of the challenges that arise when matching web tables to knowledge bases. This thesis systematically evaluates the utility of a wide range of different features for the web table to knowledge base matching task using a single gold standard. The results of the evaluation are used afterwards to design a holistic matching method which covers all matching tasks and outperforms state-of-the-art web table to knowledge base matching systems. In order to achieve these goals, we first propose the T2K Match algorithm which addresses all three matching tasks in an integrated fashion. In addition, we introduce the T2D gold standard which covers a wide variety of challenges. By evaluating T2K Match against the T2D gold standard, we identify that only considering the table content is insufficient. Hence, we include features of three categories: features found in the table, in the table context like the page title, and features that base on external resources like a synonym dictionary. We analyze the utility of the features for each matching task. The analysis shows that certain problems cannot be overcome by matching each table in isolation to the knowledge base. In addition, relying on the features is not enough for the property matching task. Based on these findings, we extend T2K Match into T2K Match++ which exploits indirect matches to web tables about the same topic and uses knowledge derived from the knowledge base. We show that T2K Match++ outperforms all state-of-the-art web table to knowledge base matching approaches on the T2D and Limaye gold standard. Most systems show good results on one matching task but T2K Match++ is the only system that achieves F-measure scores above 0:8 for all tasks. Compared to results of the best performing system TableMiner+, the F-measure for the difficult property matching task is increased by 0.08, for the class and instance matching task by 0.05 and 0.03, respectively