Ten Years of Web Tables

Michael J. Cafarella
Alon Halevy
Cong Yu
Daisy Zhe Wang
Eugene Wu
PVLDB (2018)
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Abstract

In 2008, we wrote about WebTables, an effort to exploit the large and diverse set of structured databases casually published online in the form of HTML tables. The pastdecade has seen a flurry of research and commercial activity around the WebTables project itself, as well as the broad topic of informal online structured data. As exciting as the past decade as been, we think the next ten years hold evenmore promise. In this paper, we will review the WebTables project, and try to place it in the broader context ofthe decade of work that followed. We will also propose an agenda for the next ten exciting years of work, a project that can draw upon many unexpected corners of the data management community