Ten Years of WebTables

Summary: Retrospective on WebTables: exploiting accessible HTML tables as informal structured data. Surveys a decade of progress across academia and industry, situates WebTables in the data-management landscape, and sketches a forward-looking agenda for informal data research. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 11914
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 7.5779937e-05
Overall Rank: 3,271 | 77.56%
DOI: 10.14778/3229863.3240492

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Michael Cafarella (University of Michigan)
2. Alon Halevy (Megagon Labs)
3. Hongrae Lee (Google)
4. Jayant Madhavan (Google)
5. Cong Yu (Google)
6. Daisy Zhe Wang (University of Florida)
7. Eugene Wu (Columbia University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{cafarella_vldb18,
        title = {{Ten Years of WebTables}},
        author = {Cafarella, Michael and Halevy, Alon and Lee, Hongrae and Madhavan, Jayant and Yu, Cong and Wang, Daisy Zhe and Wu, Eugene},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '18},
        volume = {11},
        number = {12},
        pages = {2140--2149},
        doi = {10.14778/3229863.3240492},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3229863.3240492},
        year = {2018}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,303	Finding Related Tables in Data Lakes for Interactive Data Science	2020	SIGMOD	0.0001123653
2,790	GitTables: A Large-Scale Corpus of Relational Tables	2023	SIGMOD	8.1200509e-05
4,687	Knowledge Graphs 2021: A Data Odyssey	2021	VLDB	6.5620198e-05
7,482	Table Extraction and Understanding for Scientific and Enterprise Applications	2020	VLDB	5.6078973e-05
8,886	QuTE: Answering Quantity Queries from Web Tables	2021	SIGMOD	5.351298e-05
9,316	Automatically Generating Interesting Facts from Wikipedia Tables	2019	SIGMOD	5.289545e-05
11,270	Searching Data Lakes for Nested and Joined Data	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 19 of 19 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
37	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00048017193
91	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB	0.00034838835
112	HoloClean: Holistic Data Repairs with Probabilistic Inference	2017	VLDB	0.00032801121
317	Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships	2010	VLDB	0.00021402049
367	InfoGather: Entity Augmentation and Attribute Discovery By Holistic Matching with Web Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.00019979463
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
1,055	Answering Table Queries on the Web using Column Keywords	2012	VLDB	0.00012389274
1,316	Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web	2009	VLDB	0.00011181216
3,127	Toward Computational Fact-Checking	2014	VLDB	7.7308958e-05
3,181	InfoGather+: Semantic Matching and Annotation of Numeric and Time-Varying Attributes in Web Tables	2013	SIGMOD	7.6595256e-05
3,211	Biperpedia: An Ontology for Search Applications	2014	VLDB	7.6330836e-05
3,574	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.2958137e-05
3,715	SLiMFast: Guaranteed Results for Data Fusion and Source Reliability	2017	SIGMOD	7.1763559e-05
4,410	Extracting Databases from Dark Data with DeepDive	2016	SIGMOD	6.717496e-05
7,575	Scalable Column Concept Determination for Web Tables Using Large Knowledge Bases	2013	VLDB	5.5937684e-05
8,131	Applying WebTables in Practice	2015	CIDR	5.4816838e-05
9,268	Knowledge Exploration Using Tables on the Web	2017	VLDB	5.295208e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	12,595	Large-Scale Collaborative Analysis and Extraction of Web Data	2008	VLDB
2	14,187	Is Web-site Management a Database Problem?	1998	VLDB
3	14,213	Future Directions and Research Problems in the World Wide Web	1996	PODS
4	14,021	Data Management: Lasting Impact of the Wild, Wild, Web	2001	SIGMOD
5	2,415	Schema Extraction for Tabular Data on the Web	2013	VLDB
6	13,788	Databases on the Web	2007	SIGMOD
7	6,573	Web Data Management	2011	SIGMOD
8	2,096	An Analysis of Structured Data on the Web	2012	VLDB
9	91	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB
10	8,131	Applying WebTables in Practice	2015	CIDR