Enabling Interactive Access to Web Tables

摘要

Tables are widely used in web pages. Unfortunately, most web tables can only be passively accessed but cannot be interactively accessed, that is, users can view information displayed in tables but cannot control the presentation of tables like sorting data and hiding or showing a column/row. Interactive access is especially useful when encountering large tables or browsing on small screens. In this paper, we propose to enable interactive access to genuine web tables based on automatic table detection and a good understanding of table contents. We designed and implemented a plug-in for the Microsoft Internet Explorer, called the iWebTable, which provides a customized user interface supporting interactive access to genuine web tables. Experimental results show that users are satisfied and really enjoy the interactive access mode to web tables, especially in such cases as they need to sort data in large tables or compare data in distant columns or rows.