From tabular data to knowledge graphs: A survey of semantic table interpretation tasks and methods

Tabular data often refers to data that is organized in a table with rows and columns. We observe that this data format is widely used on the Web and within enterprise data repositories. Tables potentially contain rich semantic information that still needs to be interpreted. The process of extracting meaningful information out of tabular data with respect to a semantic artefact, such as an ontology or a knowledge graph, is often referred to as Semantic Table Interpretation (STI) or Semantic Table Annotation. In this survey paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date state-of-the-art review of the different tasks and methods that have been proposed so far to perform STI. First, we propose a new categorization that reflects the heterogeneity of table types that one can encounter, revealing different challenges that need to be addressed. Next, we define five major sub-tasks that STI deals with even if the literature has mostly focused on three sub-tasks so far. We review and group the many approaches that have been proposed into three macro families and we discuss their performance and limitations with respect to the various datasets and benchmarks proposed by the community. Finally, we detail what are the remaining scientific barriers to be able to truly automatically interpret any type of tables that can be found in the wild Web.