We describe Thresher, a system that lets non-technical users teach their browsers how to extract semantic web content from HTML documents on the World Wide Web. Users specify examples of semantic content by highlighting them in a web browser and describing their meaning. We then use the tree edit distance between the DOM subtrees of these examples to create a general pattern, or wrapper, for the content, and allow the user to bind RDF classes and predicates to the nodes of these wrappers. By overlaying matches to these patterns on standard documents inside the Haystack semantic web browser, we enable a rich semantic interaction with existing web pages, "unwrapping" semantic data buried in the pages' HTML. By allowing end-users to create, modify, and utilize their own patterns, we hope to speed adoption and use of the Semantic Web and its applications.
SPROUT 2 is a query answering system that allows users to ask structured queries over tables embedded in Web pages, over Google Fusion tables, and over uncertain tables that can be extracted from answers to Google Squared. At the core of this service lies SPROUT, a query engine for probabilistic databases. This demonstration allows users to compose and ask ad-hoc queries of their choice and also to take a tour through the system's capabilities along pre-arranged scenarios on, e.g., movie actors and directors, biomass facilities, or leveraging corporate databases.
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