Making Sense of Numerical Data - Semantic Labelling of Web Tables

With the increasing amount of structured data on the web the need to understand and support search over this emerging data space is growing. Adding semantics to structured data can help address existing challenges in data discovery, as it facilitates understanding the values in their context. While there are approaches on how to lift structured data to semantic web formats to enrich it and facilitate discovery, most work to date focuses on textual fields rather than numerical data. In this paper, we propose a two level (row and column based) approach to add semantic meaning to numerical values in tables, called NUMER. We evaluate our approach using a benchmark (NumDB) generated for the purpose of this work. We show the influence of the different levels of analysis on the success of assigning semantic labels to numerical values in tables. Our approach outperforms the state of the art and is less affected by data structure and quality issues such as a small number of entities or deviations in the data.