Automatic Construction of RDF with Web Tables

Abstract Being a metadata model, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been widely used in the context of semantic extraction, unified organization and intelligent processing of a large number of data because RDF’s machine understandability. Knowledge graph based on RDF model, for example, is predominantly generated from massive data with various models and formats. While many efforts have been carried out in converting databases and XML into RDF, the generation of RDF from Web tables currently receives less attention due to their flexible and complex structure as well as difficult understanding. Given that billions of Web tables are widely used in real-world applications, in this paper, we devote to the automatic construction of RDF with diverse Web tables. We recognize total six representative types of Web tables that have been extensively applied in Web-based applications, including Web tables with simple structure and complex structure. For each type of Web tables, we propose our approach for converting it into RDF. Our approaches can well identify the semantics of Web tables with complex structure and then generate the corresponding RDF. We implement an RDF generation system and experimental results show the feasibility of our proposed approaches.