An ontology driven annotation of data tables

Abstract

This paper deals with the integration of data extracted from the web into an existing data warehouse indexed by a domain ontology. We are specially interested in data tables extracted from scientific publications found on the web. We propose a way to annotate data tables from the web according to a given domain ontology. In this paper we present the different steps of our annotation process. The columns of a web data table are first segregated according to whether they represent numeric or symbolic data. Then, we annotate the numeric (resp.symbolic) columns with their corresponding numeric (resp. symbolic) type found in the ontology. Our approach combines different evidences from the column contents and from the column title to find the best corresponding type in the ontology. The relations represented by the web data table are recognized using both the table title and the types of the columns that were previously annotated. We give experimental results of our annotation process, our application domain being food microbiology