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: hf55f1595c6c28f81
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 7.4774952e-05
Overall Rank: 3,247 | 78.24%
DOI: 10.14778/3229863.3240492
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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
1,268	Finding Related Tables in Data Lakes for Interactive Data Science	2020	SIGMOD	0.00011243615
2,334	GitTables: A Large-Scale Corpus of Relational Tables	2023	SIGMOD	8.6058607e-05
4,384	Knowledge Graphs 2021: A Data Odyssey	2021	VLDB	6.6139064e-05
6,676	Table Extraction and Understanding for Scientific and Enterprise Applications	2020	VLDB	5.6964661e-05
8,969	QuTE: Answering Quantity Queries from Web Tables	2021	SIGMOD	5.2354133e-05
9,534	Automatically Generating Interesting Facts from Wikipedia Tables	2019	SIGMOD	5.151324e-05
11,651	Searching Data Lakes for Nested and Joined Data	2024	VLDB	4.9605343e-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
38	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00047300197
88	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB	0.00035500667
100	HoloClean: Holistic Data Repairs with Probabilistic Inference	2017	VLDB	0.00033951027
314	Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships	2010	VLDB	0.0002126519
367	InfoGather: Entity Augmentation and Attribute Discovery By Holistic Matching with Web Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.00019882429
484	Data Integration for the Relational Web	2009	VLDB	0.00017535511
705	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.00014626858
753	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB	0.00014228161
1,037	Answering Table Queries on the Web using Column Keywords	2012	VLDB	0.00012357454
1,336	Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web	2009	VLDB	0.00010969394
3,183	Toward Computational Fact-Checking	2014	VLDB	7.5408249e-05
3,257	InfoGather+: Semantic Matching and Annotation of Numeric and Time-Varying Attributes in Web Tables	2013	SIGMOD	7.4732058e-05
3,289	Biperpedia: An Ontology for Search Applications	2014	VLDB	7.4395547e-05
3,618	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.1365624e-05
3,797	SLiMFast: Guaranteed Results for Data Fusion and Source Reliability	2017	SIGMOD	6.9951279e-05
4,403	Extracting Databases from Dark Data with DeepDive	2016	SIGMOD	6.6033854e-05
7,728	Scalable Column Concept Determination for Web Tables Using Large Knowledge Bases	2013	VLDB	5.4515436e-05
8,303	Applying WebTables in Practice	2015	CIDR	5.3430314e-05
9,482	Knowledge Exploration Using Tables on the Web	2017	VLDB	5.1568391e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	12,933	Large-Scale Collaborative Analysis and Extraction of Web Data	2008	VLDB
2	14,543	Is Web-site Management a Database Problem?	1998	VLDB
3	14,569	Future Directions and Research Problems in the World Wide Web	1996	PODS
4	14,377	Data Management: Lasting Impact of the Wild, Wild, Web	2001	SIGMOD
5	2,289	Schema Extraction for Tabular Data on the Web	2013	VLDB
6	14,144	Databases on the Web	2007	SIGMOD
7	6,715	Web Data Management	2011	SIGMOD
8	2,135	An Analysis of Structured Data on the Web	2012	VLDB
9	88	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB
10	8,303	Applying WebTables in Practice	2015	CIDR