Indexing relations on the web

There has been a substantial increase in the volume of (semi) structured data on the Web. This opens new opportunities for exploring and querying these data that goes beyond the keyword-based queries traditionally used on the Web. But supporting queries over a very large number of apparently disconnected Web sources is challenging. In this paper we propose index methods that capture both the structure of the sources and connections between them. The indexes are designed for data that is represented as relations, such as HTML tables, and support queries with predicates. We show how associations between overlapping sources are discovered, captured in the indexes, and used to derive query rewritings that join multiple sources. We demonstrate, through an experimental evaluation.