Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web

Summary: Domain-independent, unsupervised extraction of relational tables from noisy, delimiter-inconsistent Web lists, using multi-source line splitting and cross-line alignment correction guided by HTML-table corpora. Confidence scoring and large-scale crawling suggest tens of millions of queryable tables. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 10065
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2009
Pagerank: 0.00011181216
Overall Rank: 1,316 | 90.98%
DOI: 10.14778/1687627.1687749

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Hazem Elmeleegy (Purdue University)
2. Jayant Madhavan (Google)
3. Alon Halevy (Google)

BibTeX Citation

@article{elmeleegy_vldb09,
        title = {{Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web}},
        author = {Elmeleegy, Hazem and Madhavan, Jayant and Halevy, Alon},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '09},
        doi = {10.14778/1687627.1687749},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1687627.1687749},
        year = {2009}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 21 of 21 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
493	Data Integration for the Relational Web	2009	VLDB	0.00017558709
739	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.0001448231
753	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB	0.00014336094
1,160	BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations	2016	VLDB	0.00011883163
1,684	Answering Table Augmentation Queries from Unstructured Lists on the Web [Extended Abstract]	2009	VLDB	0.0001001843
2,096	An Analysis of Structured Data on the Web	2012	VLDB	9.1746663e-05
2,099	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	9.1682353e-05
2,322	Extraction and Integration of Partially Overlapping Web Sources	2013	VLDB	8.7526172e-05
2,744	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1781662e-05
3,271	Ten Years of WebTables	2018	VLDB	7.5779937e-05
3,340	Automatic Wrappers for Large Scale Web Extraction	2011	VLDB	7.5040045e-05
3,574	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.2958137e-05
3,894	Navigating the Data Lake with DATAMARAN: Automatically Extracting Structure from Log Datasets	2018	SIGMOD	7.0417782e-05
4,168	Pytheas: Pattern-based Table Discovery in CSV Files	2020	VLDB	6.8570481e-05
6,011	From Information to Knowledge: Harvesting Entities and Relationships from Web Sources	2010	PODS	6.0105397e-05
6,861	An Efficient Publish/Subscribe Index for E-Commerce Databases	2014	VLDB	5.7517379e-05
7,575	Scalable Column Concept Determination for Web Tables Using Large Knowledge Bases	2013	VLDB	5.5937684e-05
8,246	Automatic Web-Scale Information Extraction	2012	SIGMOD	5.4574671e-05
9,395	Web Record Extraction with Invariants	2023	VLDB	5.2755515e-05
9,399	Glean: Structured Extractions from Templatic Documents	2021	VLDB	5.2755515e-05
12,250	Provenance-based Dictionary Refinement in Information Extraction	2013	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
91	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB	0.00034838835
503	RoadRunner: Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites	2001	VLDB	0.00017314037
588	Extracting Structured Data from Web Pages	2003	SIGMOD	0.00016092668
717	Automatic segmentation of text into structured records	2001	SIGMOD	0.00014649121
1,554	Google’s Deep-Web Crawl	2008	VLDB	0.00010372108
2,329	Record-Boundary Discovery in Web Documents	1999	SIGMOD	8.7453177e-05
3,523	Using the Structure of Web Sites for Automatic Segmentation of Tables	2004	SIGMOD	7.3452966e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,131	Applying WebTables in Practice	2015	CIDR
2	739	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD
3	753	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB
4	1,055	Answering Table Queries on the Web using Column Keywords	2012	VLDB
5	3,574	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD
6	2,415	Schema Extraction for Tabular Data on the Web	2013	VLDB
7	317	Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships	2010	VLDB
8	91	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB
9	3,523	Using the Structure of Web Sites for Automatic Segmentation of Tables	2004	SIGMOD
10	1,684	Answering Table Augmentation Queries from Unstructured Lists on the Web [Extended Abstract]	2009	VLDB