Towards Comparison of Table Type Taxonomies.

Tables are ubiquitously used to share relational data in various media and formats. Particularly, an enormous number of HTML tables are contained in web pages. They are a valuable data source for applications of web mining, question-answering, and knowledge base construction. However, not all HTML tables are genuine (i.e. containing relational data). Most of them are utilised as means of layout and navigation. In turn, the genuine tables can have different features of layouts, formatting, and content. One of the prevalent problems in web table extraction is to determine main functional and layout types and properties of tables wide-spread on the Web. Currently, a wide range of taxonomies of table types and properties is available to researchers and practitioners. All of these taxonomies could be utilised for table type classification in order to choose further type-specific treatment of tabular data. The existing taxonomies provide similar table types but use the confusing terminology. This paper is an attempt to overview the existing taxonomies of table types by matching their terminology and comparing them qualitatively.