Converting and annotating quantitative data tables

Abstract

Companies, governmental agencies and scientists produce a large amount of quantitative (research) data, consisting of measurements ranging from e.g. the surface temperatures of an ocean to the viscosity of a sample of mayonnaise. Such measurements are stored in tables in e.g. spreadsheet files and research reports. To integrate and reuse such data, it is necessary to have a semantic description of the data. However, the notation used is often ambiguous, making automatic interpretation and conversion to RDF or other suitable format difficult. For example, the table header cell "f (Hz)" refers to frequency measured in Hertz, but the symbol "f" can also refer to the unit farad or the quantities force or luminous flux. Current annotation tools for this task either work on less ambiguous data or perform a more limited task. We introduce new disambiguation strategies based on an ontology, which allows to improve performance on "sloppy" datasets not yet targeted by existing systems. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.