Enabling Interactive Access to Web Tables

Abstract

Abstract. Tables are widely used in web pages. Unfortunately, most web tables can only be passively accessed but cannot be interactively accessed, that is, users can view information displayed in tables but cannot control the presentation of tables like sorting data and hiding or showing a column/row. Interactive access is especially useful when encountering large tables or browsing on small screens. In this paper, we propose to enable interactive access to genuine web tables based on automatic table detection and a good understanding of table contents. We designed and implemented a plug-in for the Microsoft Internet Explorer, called the iWebTable, which provides a customized user interface supporting interactive access to genuine web tables. Experimental results show that users are satisfied and really enjoy the interactive access mode to web tables, especially in such cases as they need to sort data in large tables or compare data in distant columns or rows.

iWebImage: Enabling real-time interactive access to web images

“…Yang and her colleagues also proposed to enable interactive access to web tables. They implemented a plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer that provided a user interface for the functionality [17] [18]. An extension for Firefox named TableTools [14] is also developed to provide similar functionality.…”

“…Currently, it remains a challenge to efficiently browse web pages on mobile devices and users' browsing experience needs to be improved even for PCs. A practical way is to enhance the browsing of meaningful and often-used web page elements, such as tables [15][17] [18] and images [3][8] [9].…”

Enhancing browsing experience of table and image elements in web pages

“…Yang and her colleagues proposed to enable interactive access to web tables. They implemented a plugin for Microsoft Internet Explorer that provided a user interface for the functionality [24] [25]. An extension for Firefox named TableTools [21] was also developed to provide similar functionality.…”