Whether traveling to a new place or deciding between vacation spots, people often use the Web to gather needed information and to analyze related locations on a cartographic map. These tasks often involve looking up topics of the same semantic type, such as potential airports near a particular city. However, this information gathering and integration can be tedious and time-consuming. In addition, current automatic data-integration systems are often error-prone and do not provide many tools to help users detect and fix these errors.

We present Tablin, a system that facilitates end-user data integration tasks involved in building mashups fromWeb-based data tables. Tablin allows users to resolve sets of named entities, sourced from the Web or from user input, against Freebase data. Users can then augment these resolved sets with related data, and view the results in tabular or map-based form. Tablin's main contribution is the use of semantic types as an interface to help users interactively perform collective named-entity queries, understand data sourcing, and fix data-integration errors along the way.

Prior to our work on Tablin, we investigated keyword query-based table augmentation of Wikipedia data tables in Vispedia, and developed lightweight semantic-aware web interaction techniques in "Programming by a Sample: Rapidly Creating Web Applications with d.mix".

Leslie Wu, Sharon Lin
"Interactive End-user Data Integration for a Geospatial Web: Tabular Sensemaking with on-demand Mashups"
(Technical Report, 2010)

Leslie Wu, Sharon Lin
"Interactive End-user Data Integration for a Geospatial Web: Tabular Sensemaking with on-demand Mashups"
(Technical Report, 2010)

Bryan Chan, Justin Talbot, Leslie Wu, Nathan Sakunkoo, Mike Cammarano, Pat Hanrahan
"Vispedia: On-demand Data Integration for Interactive Visualization and Exploration"
(ACM SIGMOD Demo Paper, 2009)

Bryan Chan, Leslie Wu, Justin Talbot, Mike Cammarano, Pat Hanrahan
"Vispedia: Interactive Visual Exploration of Wikipedia Data via Search-Based Integration"
(IEEE Information Visualization, 2008)

Mike Cammarano, Xin (Luna) Dong, Bryan Chan, Jeff Klingner, Alon Halevy, and Pat Hanrahan,
"Visualization of Heterogeneous Data"
(IEEE Information Visualization, 2007)

Hartmann, Björn, Leslie Wu, Kevin Collins, Scott R. Klemmer,
"Programming by a Sample: Rapidly Prototyping Web Applications with d.mix"
(ACM UIST 2007 Full paper)

2009 - Stanford HCI Lunch

2010 - IBM Research Almaden

Bryan Chan
Justin Talbot
Pat Hanrahan
Alon Halevy