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: 0.00010982201
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	0.00017541069
718	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.00014526813
757	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB	0.00014199305
1,095	BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations	2016	VLDB	0.00012048043
1,696	Answering Table Augmentation Queries from Unstructured Lists on the Web [Extended Abstract]	2009	VLDB	9.8500557e-05
1,977	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	9.2760522e-05
2,122	An Analysis of Structured Data on the Web	2012	VLDB	9.0057027e-05
2,254	Extraction and Integration of Partially Overlapping Web Sources	2013	VLDB	8.7438361e-05
2,642	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1751637e-05
3,289	Ten Years of WebTables	2018	VLDB	7.4500131e-05
3,395	Automatic Wrappers for Large Scale Web Extraction	2011	VLDB	7.3403288e-05
3,615	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.1558238e-05
3,913	Navigating the Data Lake with DATAMARAN: Automatically Extracting Structure from Log Datasets	2018	SIGMOD	6.9274273e-05
4,245	Pytheas: Pattern-based Table Discovery in CSV Files	2020	VLDB	6.7035571e-05
6,105	From Information to Knowledge: Harvesting Entities and Relationships from Web Sources	2010	PODS	5.8836889e-05
7,008	An Efficient Publish/Subscribe Index for E-Commerce Databases	2014	VLDB	5.6200227e-05
7,716	Scalable Column Concept Determination for Web Tables Using Large Knowledge Bases	2013	VLDB	5.4692136e-05
8,452	Automatic Web-Scale Information Extraction	2012	SIGMOD	5.3324907e-05
9,586	Web Record Extraction with Invariants	2023	VLDB	5.154741e-05
9,589	Glean: Structured Extractions from Templatic Documents	2021	VLDB	5.154741e-05
12,547	Provenance-based Dictionary Refinement in Information Extraction	2013	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-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	0.00035115118
515	RoadRunner: Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites	2001	VLDB	0.00016962516
599	Extracting Structured Data from Web Pages	2003	SIGMOD	0.00015748113
736	Automatic segmentation of text into structured records	2001	SIGMOD	0.0001436639
1,582	Google’s Deep-Web Crawl	2008	VLDB	0.00010168682
2,375	Record-Boundary Discovery in Web Documents	1999	SIGMOD	8.5547553e-05
3,589	Using the Structure of Web Sites for Automatic Segmentation of Tables	2004	SIGMOD	7.1837396e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,291	Applying WebTables in Practice	2015	CIDR
2	718	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD
3	1,053	Answering Table Queries on the Web using Column Keywords	2012	VLDB
4	757	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB
5	3,615	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD
6	2,352	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	3,589	Using the Structure of Web Sites for Automatic Segmentation of Tables	2004	SIGMOD
10	1,696	Answering Table Augmentation Queries from Unstructured Lists on the Web [Extended Abstract]	2009	VLDB