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: he5ed444be1ca315d
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2009
Pagerank: 0.00010987014
Overall Rank: 1,337 | 91.02%
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
484	Data Integration for the Relational Web	2009	VLDB	0.00017548541
717	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.00014532116
757	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB	0.00014205602
1,094	BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations	2016	VLDB	0.0001205355
1,697	Answering Table Augmentation Queries from Unstructured Lists on the Web [Extended Abstract]	2009	VLDB	9.8545388e-05
1,978	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	9.2730152e-05
2,120	An Analysis of Structured Data on the Web	2012	VLDB	9.0098024e-05
2,255	Extraction and Integration of Partially Overlapping Web Sources	2013	VLDB	8.7442418e-05
2,641	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1787073e-05
3,288	Ten Years of WebTables	2018	VLDB	7.4530805e-05
3,395	Automatic Wrappers for Large Scale Web Extraction	2011	VLDB	7.3436783e-05
3,615	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.1591776e-05
3,912	Navigating the Data Lake with DATAMARAN: Automatically Extracting Structure from Log Datasets	2018	SIGMOD	6.9306061e-05
4,244	Pytheas: Pattern-based Table Discovery in CSV Files	2020	VLDB	6.7067197e-05
6,104	From Information to Knowledge: Harvesting Entities and Relationships from Web Sources	2010	PODS	5.886265e-05
7,007	An Efficient Publish/Subscribe Index for E-Commerce Databases	2014	VLDB	5.6226844e-05
7,709	Scalable Column Concept Determination for Web Tables Using Large Knowledge Bases	2013	VLDB	5.4717883e-05
8,443	Automatic Web-Scale Information Extraction	2012	SIGMOD	5.3350162e-05
9,578	Web Record Extraction with Invariants	2023	VLDB	5.1571823e-05
9,581	Glean: Structured Extractions from Templatic Documents	2021	VLDB	5.1571823e-05
12,541	Provenance-based Dictionary Refinement in Information Extraction	2013	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-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
89	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB	0.00035129658
515	RoadRunner: Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites	2001	VLDB	0.00016970049
599	Extracting Structured Data from Web Pages	2003	SIGMOD	0.0001575536
735	Automatic segmentation of text into structured records	2001	SIGMOD	0.00014373044
1,582	Google’s Deep-Web Crawl	2008	VLDB	0.00010173382
2,374	Record-Boundary Discovery in Web Documents	1999	SIGMOD	8.5587497e-05
3,588	Using the Structure of Web Sites for Automatic Segmentation of Tables	2004	SIGMOD	7.1870903e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,285	Applying WebTables in Practice	2015	CIDR
2	717	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD
3	757	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB
4	1,053	Answering Table Queries on the Web using Column Keywords	2012	VLDB
5	3,615	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD
6	2,351	Schema Extraction for Tabular Data on the Web	2013	VLDB
7	316	Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships	2010	VLDB
8	89	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB
9	3,588	Using the Structure of Web Sites for Automatic Segmentation of Tables	2004	SIGMOD
10	1,697	Answering Table Augmentation Queries from Unstructured Lists on the Web [Extended Abstract]	2009	VLDB