Transforming a Nonstandard Table into Formalized Tables

Abstract

Tables and spreadsheets on the Internet often contain valuable information, but are created by people who have different individuation. As a result, the similar data are often issued with different structures. This limits the integration of such tables. This paper aims to overcome this problem by automatically analyzing the structure area and propose the method transforming the tables into formal relational tables. We propose the methods on identifying structure area, modeling the table structure based on tree and methods to generate the 1NF schema of the original table. We proved the correctness of the method in semantic and the experiment results with tables from different areas demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.