Heuristic Algorithm for Automatic Extraction Relational Data from Spreadsheet Hierarchical Tables

Spreadsheets are contained critical information on various topics and were most broadly utilized in numerous spaces. There are a huge amount of spreadsheet clients everywhere in the world. Spreadsheets provide considerable flexibility for data structure organization. As well as it gives their makers an enormous level of opportunity to encode their data as it is simple to utilize and easy to store the data in a table format. Because of this flexibility, tables with very complex and hierarchical data structures could be generated. Thusly, such complexity makes table processing and reusing this data is a difficult task. Therefore, the expansion in volume and complexity of these tables has prompted the necessity to preserve this data and reuse it. As a result, this paper implemented a novel algorithm-based heuristic technique and cell classification strategy to automate relational data extraction from spreadsheet hierarchical tables and without need any programming language experience. Finally, the paper does experiments on 2 different real public datasets. The percentage of average accuracy using the proposed approach on the two datasets is 95 % and 94.2% respectively.

@article{Awad2021,
  title     = {Heuristic Algorithm for Automatic Extraction Relational Data from Spreadsheet Hierarchical Tables},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {10},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Arwa Awad and Rania Elgohary and Ibrahim Moawad and Mohamed Roushdy},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0121082},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0121082}
}