KTabulator: Interactive Ad hoc Table Creation using Knowledge Graphs

ABSTRACTThe need to find or construct tables arises routinely to accomplish many tasks in everyday life, as a table is a common format for organizing data. However, when relevant data is found on the web, it is often scattered across multiple tables on different web pages, requiring tedious manual searching and copy-pasting to collect data. We propose KTabulator, an interactive system to effectively extract, build, or extend ad hoc tables from large corpora, by leveraging their computerized structures in the form of knowledge graphs. We developed and evaluated KTabulator using Wikipedia and its knowledge graph DBpedia as our testbed. Starting from an entity or an existing table, KTabulator allows users to extend their tables by finding relevant entities, their properties, and other relevant tables, while providing meaningful suggestions and guidance. The results of a user study indicate the usefulness and efficiency of KTabulator in ad hoc table creation.