Structured Querying of Web Text: A Technical Challenge

Summary: ExDB: an extraction database combining information extraction with a SQL-like data model and query language to enable structured queries over Web text. Details core challenges—uncertain/heterogeneous extractions, indexing and query optimization at Web scale—and validates ideas on a 90M-page prototype. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 79
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 9.9098087e-05
Overall Rank: 1,728 | 88.15%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Michael J. Cafarella (University of Washington)
2. Christopher Ré (University of Washington)
3. Dan Suciu (University of Washington)
4. Oren Etzioni (University of Washington)
5. Michele Banko (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{cafarella_cidr07,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '07},
        title = {{Structured Querying of Web Text: A Technical Challenge}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Cafarella, Michael J. and Ré, Christopher and Suciu, Dan and Etzioni, Oren and Banko, Michele},
        year = {2007}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
628	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00015630285
1,689	EntityRank: Searching Entities Directly and Holistically	2007	VLDB	0.00010003102
2,832	Expressive and Flexible Access to Web-Extracted Data: A Keyword-based Structured Query Language	2010	SIGMOD	8.0783003e-05
2,936	Materialized Views in Probabilistic Databases: For Information Exchange and Query Optimization	2007	VLDB	7.9437689e-05
4,461	Extracting and Querying a Comprehensive Web Database	2009	CIDR	6.6889881e-05
5,130	Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	6.354484e-05
6,118	ELEET: Efficient Learned Query Execution over Text and Tables	2024	VLDB	5.9698795e-05
7,239	I4E: Interactive Investigation of Iterative Information Extraction	2010	SIGMOD	5.6645117e-05
10,719	Doctopus: A System for Budget-aware Structural Data Extraction from Unstructured Documents	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,439	DoCQS: A Prototype System for Supporting Data-oriented Content Query	2010	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,451	QUICK: Expressive and Flexible Search over Knowledge Bases and Text Collections	2010	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5	Optimal Aggregation Algorithms for Middleware [Extended Abstract]	2001	PODS	0.0010828372
37	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00048017193
50	Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00043596705
78	ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.00036571789
107	Approximate String Joins in a Database (Almost) for Free	2001	VLDB	0.00033511706
125	Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage	2005	CIDR	0.00030932014
228	Reference Reconciliation in Complex Information Spaces	2005	SIGMOD	0.00023941271
359	Evaluating Probabilistic Queries over Imprecise Data	2003	SIGMOD	0.0002023153
499	Supporting Incremental Join Queries on Ranked Inputs	2001	VLDB	0.00017431827
1,519	Top-k Query Evaluation with Probabilistic Guarantees	2004	VLDB	0.00010513777
1,540	Crossing the Structure Chasm	2003	CIDR	0.00010430413
3,690	Toward Large Scale Integration: Building a MetaQuerier over Databases on the Web	2005	CIDR	7.2007927e-05

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2	588	Extracting Structured Data from Web Pages	2003	SIGMOD
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4	2,096	An Analysis of Structured Data on the Web	2012	VLDB
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6	4,461	Extracting and Querying a Comprehensive Web Database	2009	CIDR
7	5,545	A Hierarchical Approach to Model Web Query Interfaces for Web Source Integration	2009	VLDB
8	2,724	A Relational Approach to Incrementally Extracting and Querying Structure in Unstructured Data	2007	VLDB
9	13,921	QXtract: A Building Block for Efficient Information Extraction from Text Databases	2003	SIGMOD
10	2,832	Expressive and Flexible Access to Web-Extracted Data: A Keyword-based Structured Query Language	2010	SIGMOD