Foofah: A Programming-By-Example System for Synthesizing Data Transformation Programs

Summary: Programming-by-example system for synthesizing data transformation programs. Foofah requires only a small input-output example; it synthesizes a transformation program to automate real-world data wrangling tasks. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5428
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 5.5273054e-05
Overall Rank: 7,869 | 46.02%
DOI: 10.1145/3035918.3058732

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Zhongjun Jin (University of Michigan)
2. Michael R. Anderson (University of Michigan)
3. Michael Cafarella (University of Michigan)
4. H. V. Jagadish (University of Michigan)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{jin_sigmod17,
        title = {{Foofah: A Programming-By-Example System for Synthesizing Data Transformation Programs}},
        author = {Jin, Zhongjun and Anderson, Michael R. and Cafarella, Michael and Jagadish, H. V.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '17},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3035918.3058732},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3035918.3058732},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,051	Towards Benchmarking Feature Type Inference for AutoML Platforms	2021	SIGMOD	6.385354e-05
6,928	How do Categorical Duplicates Affect ML? A New Benchmark and Empirical Analyses	2024	VLDB	5.7370426e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
94	Potter's Wheel: An Interactive Data Cleaning System	2001	VLDB	0.00034616103
1,165	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011860616
3,547	Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples	2012	VLDB	7.3225973e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	13,887	Efficient development of data migration transformations	2004	SIGMOD
2	1,866	Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation	2015	CIDR
3	6,092	DataXFormer: Leveraging the Web for Semantic Transformations	2015	CIDR
4	5,403	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB
5	1,030	Data-Driven Understanding and Refinement of Schema Mappings	2001	SIGMOD
6	2,077	Generating Example Data for Dataflow Programs	2009	SIGMOD
7	2,978	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations	2018	VLDB
8	4,546	DataXFormer: An Interactive Data Transformation Tool	2015	SIGMOD
9	12,088	Synthesizing Data Programs	2015	CIDR
10	1,165	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD