Interactive Conversion of Web Tables

Two hundred web tables from ten sites were imported into Excel. The tables were edited as needed, then converted into layout independent Wang Notation using the Table Abstraction Tool (TAT). The output generated by TAT consists of XML files to be used for constructing narrow-domain ontologies. On an average each table required 104 seconds for editing. Augmentations like aggregates, footnotes, table titles, captions, units and notes were also extracted in an average time of 93 seconds. Every user intervention was logged and audited. The logged interactions were analyzed to determine the relative influence of factors like table size, number of categories and various types of augmentations on the processing time. The analysis suggests which aspects of interactive table processing can be automated in the near term, and how much time such automation would save. The correlation coefficient between predicted and actual processing time was 0.66.