A Tabular Survey of Automated Table Processing

  • Authors:

  • Daniel P. Lopresti;George Nagy

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • GREC '99 Selected Papers from the Third International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, Recent Advances
  • Year:
  • 1999

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Tables are the only acceptable means of communicating certain types of structured data. A precise definition of "tabularity" remains elusive because some bureaucratic forms, multicolumn text layouts, and schematic drawings share many characteristics of tables. There are significant differences between typeset tables, electronic files designed for display of tables, and tables in symbolic form intended for information retrieval. Although most research to date has addressed the extraction of low-level geometric information from scanned raster images of paper tables, the recent trend toward the analysis of tables in electronic form may pave the way to a higherl evel of table understanding. Recent research on table composition and table analysis has improved ourunde rstanding of the distinction between the logical and physical structures of tables, and has led to improved formalisms for modeling tables. The present study indicates that progress on half-a-dozen specific research issues would open the door to using existing paper and electronic tables for database update, tabular browsing, structured information retrieval through graphical and audio interfaces, multimedia table editing, and platform-independent display. Although tables are not a conventional format for conveying the primary content of technical papers, here we attempt to subdue our natural garrulity by adopting this genre to communicate what we have to say about tables entirely in tabular form.