Annotating Table Headers Based on Semantic Web Resources

—Tables offer an often used way to represent information for the human reader. But as long as those tables are not annotated with semantic information they are meaningless to machines. In this work a methodology is proposed to annotate the headers of table columns with semantic types by creating a ranking of possible column headers based on the column cells. In the performed experiments on 10 independent columns a mean average precision value of about 0.7 was achieved. Moreover experiments showed that on average only 15 cells have to be considered to gain good results. Therefore performance does not depend on the number of rows of the table.